Bug#785196: kfreebsd-image-10-amd64: Console has no output in qemu -display curses

[Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>]

Hi Jan,

Jan Henke wrote:
> I am using kFreeBSD as a QEMU/KVM guest. I recently changed the QEMU
> configuration to use the curses display (instead of opening a VNC server).

Can you still access GRUB menus from this?  I think you simply need
to set this flag in the kfreebsd menu entry:

    set kFreeBSD.hw.vga.textmode=1

or more permanently in /etc/grub.d/10_kfreebsd.  If you don't see the
GRUB menu, uncomment "GRUB_TERMINAL=console" in /etc/default/grub
which should fix that too.

Or maybe a serial console is practical here.  You can append the
"kfreebsd " line with "-D" and then invoke Qemu with "-serial stdio"
for example.  Also uncomment the "cuau0" line in /etc/inittab to get
a login terminal.

> With an upstream FreeBSD guest that causes no problem, I can see the console
> during boot and can also login locally.

I guess that means they don't enable the VGA console by default
(although I thought they did, and maybe Debian GNU/Linux does too?).
It is rather important to support more character sets and enable more
locales.  It unfortunately breaks Qemu "-display curses", or some older
BMC/iLO/ILOM devices for remote console access to servers.

Perhaps we can keep VGA by default, but make it easier to choose
textmode with an option in the GRUB 'Advanced startup options'
submenu;  and some way to allow the admin to make that the default.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org