Text goes offscreen on VGA console

[RedBear]

Title says it all. Ever since I first started installing and booting FreeNAS (the two most recent 9.3 versions are all I've worked with so far) on my ThinkServer TS440, I have noticed that several characters of text end up being displayed off the edges of the screen. It seems to happen on all four edges of the screen to varying degrees.

Being a "server", the TS440 has only a VGA connector built in. The BIOS screens and other bootable things like Linux installers I've tried on this machine don't seem to have this issue with stretching off the physical VGA display.

I've tried two different LCD monitors, one widescreen monitor with (I think) 1680x1050 native resolution, and an older 4:3 style monitor with (I think) 1024x768 resolution. I've tried auto-adjust and manual adjustments on the monitor itself but that just stretched the displayed image even more and made the issue worse.

Are there some boot flags or something that I can set to get FreeBSD/FreeNAS to be more usable on the VGA console? None of this is an issue most of the time of course because I'm either using the web GUI or SSH, but it's just irritating not having a proper interface when I'm sitting right in front of the machine.

 

[Noctris]

You might want to take a look here: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/High_Resolution_Console

Basically, you could rebuild the kernel , then check and force a better suited mode using rc.conf.

I believe natively, FreeBSD uses 80x25 chars which some lcd's might not handle well.. I actually still use an old ( Ancient) CRT for this stuff after i had a simular prob

 

[RedBear]

You might want to take a look here: http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/High_Resolution_Console

Basically, you could rebuild the kernel , then check and force a better suited mode using rc.conf.

I believe natively, FreeBSD uses 80x25 chars which some lcd's might not handle well.. I actually still use an old ( Ancient) CRT for this stuff after i had a simular prob

Ah, so this occurs because VESA isn't even compiled into the standard FreeNAS kernel? Still? In 2015? Wow.

Well, I guess the BSD and FreeNAS maintainers know better than I what needs to be in the kernel and what doesn't, and most of these things will be run headless anyway. I'll just have to deal with it.

Thanks for the link.

 

[Noctris]

No prob. It seems that there several modes available:

Code:

[root@nebula] ~# vidcontrol -i mode < /dev/console
    mode#     flags   type    size       font      window      linear buffer
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  0 (0x000) 0x00000001 T 40x25           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  1 (0x001) 0x00000001 T 40x25           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  2 (0x002) 0x00000001 T 80x25           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  3 (0x003) 0x00000001 T 80x25           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  4 (0x004) 0x00000003 G 320x200x2 C     8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  5 (0x005) 0x00000003 G 320x200x2 C     8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
  6 (0x006) 0x00000003 G 640x200x1 C     8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
13 (0x00d) 0x00000003 G 320x200x4 4     8x8   0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
14 (0x00e) 0x00000003 G 640x200x4 4     8x8   0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
16 (0x010) 0x00000003 G 640x350x2 2     8x14  0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 128k
18 (0x012) 0x00000003 G 640x350x4 4     8x14  0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
19 (0x013) 0x00000001 T 40x25           8x14  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
20 (0x014) 0x00000001 T 40x25           8x14  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
21 (0x015) 0x00000001 T 80x25           8x14  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
22 (0x016) 0x00000001 T 80x25           8x14  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
23 (0x017) 0x00000001 T 40x25           8x16  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
24 (0x018) 0x00000001 T 80x25           8x16  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
26 (0x01a) 0x00000003 G 640x480x4 4     8x16  0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
27 (0x01b) 0x00000003 G 640x480x4 4     8x16  0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
28 (0x01c) 0x00000003 G 320x200x8 P     8x8   0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 64k
30 (0x01e) 0x00000001 T 80x50           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
32 (0x020) 0x00000001 T 80x30           8x16  0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
34 (0x022) 0x00000001 T 80x60           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
37 (0x025) 0x00000003 G 320x240x8 V     8x8   0xa0000 64k 64k 0x00000000 256k
112 (0x070) 0x00000000 T 80x43           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
113 (0x071) 0x00000001 T 80x43           8x8   0xb8000 32k 32k 0x00000000 32k
[root@nebula] ~#

So you might want to force one of those to see if that works out better with your lcd. When you find one, put it in rc.conf ?

 

[RedBear]

Now that's what I needed. Except despite going through the vidcontrol manpage I haven't been able to get it to accept any commands besides:

vidcontrol 80x25
vidcontrol 80x30
vidcontrol VGA_40x25
vidcontrol VGA_80x25
vidcontrol VGA_80x30

None of those modes are helping the overflow issue and no other mode designation is being recognized as even a valid option. Vidcontrol keeps showing me its help text as if it doesn't even know I'm trying to tell it to do something. I wanted to try that 640x480x4 mode among others but there must be something I'm still not understanding about the proper command syntax.

 

[Noctris]

Can you give me the exact command that you were using ? Should be as simple as:

Code:

vidcontrol MODE_27

 

[RedBear]

Can you give me the exact command that you were using ? Should be as simple as:

Code:

vidcontrol MODE_27

LOL. I should have noticed that "MODE_" was outside the brackets in the manpage. I was thinking "MODE_[NUMBER]" meant the syntax wanted something like VGA_80x25. Those commands I listed were the exact commands I was running. The much simpler answer was staring me in the face the whole time. It literally wants "MODE_" and the mode number from the left column. Duh. I tried "27" by itself once but of course that didn't work.

Thanks so much. I'll try this next time I have a chance to sit down in front of the machine.

One more thing though, if I add the new video mode to rc.conf, is rc.conf part of the FreeNAS configuration that gets backed up, or would I have to manually replicate this "fix" if I reinstall FreeNAS?

 

[Noctris]

i'm not a hunderd percent sure but i think that if you add the change to rc.conf through "tunables" (Freenas 9.3) , it will get backed up with a config backup

 

[RedBear]

i'm not a hunderd percent sure but i think that if you add the change to rc.conf through "tunables" (Freenas 9.3) , it will get backed up with a config backup

Ah, I see.

Unfortunately, I get errors on both MODE_27 and MODE_34. One about "innapropriate ioctl" and one about bad syntax or something. I think I'll give up on it now.

Thanks for the assistance.