Categories
FreeBSD Hardware

1024×768 FreeBSD VT Console

I use of a lot of old kit in my lab. Some of these machines have very poor ACPI implementations and they often complete their boot displaying an 80×25 character console on monitors that can support much higher resolutions. I have put up with staggered ZFS listings for too long and decided to fix this problem on my FreeBSD hosts.

Modern FreeBSD uses the VT console by default. If a video graphics driver has been installed, it will display a console in a higher resolution if configured.

The configuration below was tested on FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE-p1 and FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5 with onboard intel graphics adapter.

Install the graphics driver:

$ sudo pkg install drm-kmod

Run the following command to load the intel graphics driver on boot:

$ sysrc kld_list+=i915kms

Edit /boot/loader.conf adding the following lines to the file:

# VT console
hw.vga.textmode=1
hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1
kern.vty=vt
kern.vt.fb.default_mode="1024x768"

If dmesg reports a good ACPI table, you don’t need to use hw.vga.acpi_ignore_no_vga=1 .

If you are using a screen that cannot display 1024×768, use kern.vt.fb.default_mode=”800×600″ instead.

Reboot the host to see the new console settings are active.

Categories
Alpine Linux FreeBSD Ubuntu

ZFS Trim

I noticed today that the FreeBSD ZFS pool that I created on my laptop SSD was not configured for TRIM. TRIM enables the SSD to recover space from previously written to blocks that have since had files deleted. This can help maintain performance of the SSD as it fills with data.

My pool is called zroot, so the command to check the value of the TRIM setting is:

$ zpool get autotrim zroot

The command to switch on automatic TRIM is:

$ zpool set autotrim=on zroot

 

Privacy Preference Center

      Necessary

      Advertising

      Analytics

      Other