Hi,
I have a 4K laptop in a 12" package with Intel HD520. I have been running Debian 7 and Debian 8 on it for a while and now I have updated to Debian 10.
I'm sure that you already have an idea of the issue - the console fonts on 4k are tiny, barely usable even at 32px ( does anyone know why setfont is limited to 32 pixels in high or width )?
The biggest problem is that if KMS is on which it has to be for X to accelerated graphics then the initrd uses default tiny font as described by in #859458
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=859458 which makes say answering entering a passphrase for FDE extremely difficult.
Now the solution/workaround is that while building the initrd we should blacklist i915 while allowing it to be loaded after the root is mounted. In that flow the KMS would not activate at initrd stage as i915 would be blacklisted but would activate in the late stage. I have tested this approach and it works perfectly.
Which brings me to a question:
Is there an "official" way to accomplish this via hooks in initramfs-tool? Are there user/system hooks that would be preserved across initramfs-tool updates and a correct/conventional way of implementing them?
This is initramfs-tools 0.13deb10u1
Thanks,
Alex