dvdhrm/kmscon — Issue #12: Interaction between console size and font size
Author: bluetech
Created: 2012-01-30 18:50:18+00:00
State: open

First: I use a nVidia card with the nouveau driver. I only have one monitor to test on.

The console size is determined directly according to the chosen KMS mode. However, currently the screen buffer size is initialized statically to some default (80 cols x 24 rows). The font is scaled to match the screen size and the supposed size of a single cell in the console buffer.

This seems to be backwards to me. Since kmscon is a full screen app, what the user should pick is the *font* size, not the number of rows and columns. So, for example, instead of:
Mode: 1280 x 1024, Buffer 80 x 24 -> Font height 1024 / 24 = 42 (or something like that)
What should be calculated is:
Mode: 1280 x 1024, Font size (10pt) -> Buffer 160 x 70 (or something like that).

The only thing holding this back, as far as I can tell, is that the terminal actually supports multiple outputs. I can't test it, so I'm not sure how that is supposed to work. If I have two monitors, 1280x1024 and 800x600, how would you clone a single console to both of them in a reasonable way? Is that even expected to work?

I'll be happy to hear your thoughts.