Arabic and Hebrew on the console

[Matthew Woehlke]

Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> Besides that, people can use some hardware which do not support KMS 
> (either too old, or too specific); people can use too old systems, etc. 
> Hence it is better to resolve this issue despite of the KMS feature.

Why not support VGA in KMS? That would cover nearly everything 
"reasonable" in terms of "old", and I wonder where you're getting 
hardware text mode if you don't have VGA (unless you're already using 
something like KMS, but in that case there is no problem?).

Devices without /video/ (e.g. embedded) are presumably using a serial 
console already, in which case it's simply a matter of plugging in a 
decent VT emulator, so we already don't have issues from hardware fonts.

In fact, that's a simple way to phrase it, as the question was about 
hardware fonts: what (besides CGA/EGA and even older) uses hardware 
fonts that does NOT support VGA? If the answer is "nothing", well, just 
support VGA in KMS and use the software text engine in 640x480 mode. 
That shouldn't be any different from using it in higher resolutions.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"NT was a marketing name that stood for New Technology, but it was still 
an amusing coincidence that WNT was VMS with each letter replaced by the 
next one."
   -- Jeremy Reimer