# Distorted colors in console



## G4 (Oct 10, 2016)

Hi,

I just upgraded to 11-RELEASE on a Supermicro box, and the textmode console shows weird distorted colors and flickering when scrolling lots of lines.
I obviously checked the cable.

If static, everything seems fine (80% of the time).

Has anyone seen this before?

EDIT: Here are a few pictures.

https://imgur.com/a/PW56W


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## SirDice (Oct 11, 2016)

That's either the monitor or the videocard itself that's causing it. We had one that showed purple text instead of the off-white color it normally shows. Machine was already quite old and was showing other problems too. Needless to say it didn't last very long.


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## G4 (Oct 11, 2016)

It would be a huge coincidence for the monitor/videocard to suddenly break just as i booted into the new version and the new console adjusted the resolution, whereas minutes before it was fine.

I would also mention that the screen is fine in BIOS and in the bootloader promt, and funnily enough when the ports configuration dialog is shown


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## xtaz (Oct 11, 2016)

11 enables the new vt console by default. It might be doing strange things on that hardware. Try putting `hw.vga.textmode=1` in /boot/loader.conf and seeing what that does. If that doesn't work then you can go back to the old sc console by putting `kern.vty=sc` in /boot/loader.conf.

Also you could try loading an appropriate kms kernel module which is what vt uses in the high resolution mode. Look at /boot/kernel/*kms* to see if there are any appropriate for your hardware. Personally mine uses i915 and so I load it using `i915kms_load="YES"` in /boot/loader.conf. Something like that might actually get the console working correctly.


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## Snurg (Oct 11, 2016)

If the suggestions of xtaz do not help, one thing that might help would be building a kernel without "options VESA".

This would prevent using the ancient 16-bit 8086 real mode BIOS for mode settings.
These old BIOS calls are used rarely nowadays, as it is much more effective to talk directly to the hardware, like the VGA driver does without "options VESA" activated.
So the legacy real mode BIOS is mostly partially functional nowadays regarding graphics modes which use a multitude of the 1MB 16-bit-era address space. It makes just no sense for manufacturers to try implementing that correctly in 16-bit mode, especially for server onboard VGA. So everybody who attempts to use the BIOS for things above 1024x768 risks running into problems.

On my computers, using nvidia Quadros, the trick of removing "options VESA" fixed all my video problems, from text mode distortions to suspend/resume failures.


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## SirDice (Oct 12, 2016)

G4 said:


> It would be a huge coincidence for the monitor/videocard to suddenly break just as i booted into the new version and the new console adjusted the resolution, whereas minutes before it was fine.


I've seen weirder things happen


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## G4 (Oct 21, 2016)

xtaz said:


> 11 enables the new vt console by default. It might be doing strange things on that hardware. Try putting `hw.vga.textmode=1` in /boot/loader.conf and seeing what that does.



That worked - thanks.
Probably a bug in the new vt 

As said before, I've only seen this on this Supermicro board - other boxes work fine.


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