Newcons

The last couple of months I (Ed Schouten) have been working on a project for The FreeBSD Foundation, called Newcons.

The idea of the Newcons project is to implement a new console driver (called vt(4)) that has the following features:

Unicode support.
Bigger font maps (because of the use of graphics mode).
Better use of graphics modes, such as a graphical boot procedure to make it more eye-candy for the desktop users.

Obtaining vt(4)

svn co svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/ed/newcons

Implement a generic terminal layer for the kernel: done.
Implement the core of the vt driver, screen buffering, drawing, etc: done.
Implement a VGA driver that supports at least 80x25 text mode and 640x480 graphics mode: done.
Make the keyboard layer accept Unicode: done and committed to HEAD.
Implement an Xbox framebuffer driver (as a test, because it's easy to do so): done.
Migrate syscons to xterm, to ease switching between vt(4) and syscons: in progress: done and committed to HEAD.
Write a graphics driver that works with Intel (or at least better) graphics hardware: to be done. Possibly by extending DRM to contain drawing ops.
Make kernel mode setting work: to be investigated. By using DRM, this may already be covered.