Followup to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
By author: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
>
> This idea of a 256- or 512-element font cache for the VGA text mode has
> been proposed repeatedly over the past 6 years, but nobody ever took it
> upon himself to actually implement it. Most likely because most people
> use xterm and not the VGA text mode console and perhaps also because it
> is likely to involve somewhat non-trivial kernel/user mode interactions,
> especially if you want to keep the large font data structures out of the
> kernel.
>
There are two reasons that this keeps getting suggested, and is an
equally bad idea every time:
- It takes a lot of memory. Using data modules (similar to the NLS
subsystem) helps this, but it's messy.
- It is trivial to make your console illegible by flooding the
charset.
This is much better done by a framebuffer console driver. Although
it's probably best done in user space (see kcon), it would be possible
to extend fbcon to support an arbitrary large charset.
Note: U+F000 to U+F7FF is reserved in Linux for "straight to font."
This leaves room for up to 2048 characters. Beyond that we would not
be able to support "direct to font" without going outside plane 0.
-hpa
--
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"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
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-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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