# ASpeed 2300 with console VT/SC



## ghuber (Jul 6, 2022)

Hello all,

I have an ASUS server mainboard featuring an ASpeed 2300 VGA chip. I use the machine as a *headless-text only* machine. *X will not be used *here. However, sometimes I connect a monitor and a keyboard as well.

I have set up the machine with FreeBSD 13.1. The standard vt(4) during booting switches to vga_640x480 which makes most of the terminal output unreadable. Therefore I wanted to change the resolution to 800x600. However, when I

`vidcontrol -i mode`

I receive no modes. I figured that maybe VT does not natively support the ASpeed chip. So I switched to sc(4) via /boot/loader.conf


```
kern.vty=sc
```

It actually works fine (`vidcontrol -i mode` actually gives me several modes and I also could switch to 1024x768 or 800x600), but apparently sc(4) changed the keymap to US (I usually use "DE").

Under VT, I use the ISO-8859-1 charset ("`keymap=de`" in /etc/rc.conf). I have been able to change the keyboard layout to "DE" in syscons(4) and at least now the keyboard is  using QWERTZ instead of QWERTY, but I cannot manage to display the German Umlauts such as äöü and so on. Not that I need Umlauts in a console window of a headless server, but I have to admit that it irritates me, if I press a key and get some meaningless ASCII garbage. It seems syscons(4) is unable to display UTF-8 encoding (at least the Wiki says so here).

Now I wonder, whether I have more than the two options at hand (i) to stay with syscons(4) and have no Umlauts or (ii) change to vt(4) being unable to switch resolutions. As stated above, all I want is text (with a higher resolution), there will not be X on this machine. As I won't be using X, I don't "need" vt(4), unfortunately I do not know how to properly configure syscons(4) so it displays Umlauts properly. Can anyone help?

Or could I use vt(4) and unse the kms-drm package? What I have read, however, it only supports intel/amd/mga chipsets?

Many thanks for your help!

Georg


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## T-Daemon (Jul 6, 2022)

You won't get Umlaute in sc(4) (I use myself German keyboard layout). They can be printed only in vt(4).

Maybe the ASpeed supports VBE framebuffer device. Boot the system with `kern.vty=vt` , execute `dmesg | grep 'VT('`. If the printed line looks similar to `VT(vbefb): resolution 1920x1080` then the screen resolution can be set. See `screen.textmode` and `vbe_max_resolution` in loader.conf(5).

Alternatively check the ASpeed graphics driver VBIOS and for FreeBSD. I suspect the FreeBSD driver is for Xorg, haven't checked it.


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## ghuber (Jul 7, 2022)

T-Daemon said:


> You won't get Umlaute in sc(4) (I use myself German keyboard layout). They can be printed only in vt(4).
> 
> Maybe the ASpeed supports VBE framebuffer device. Boot the system with `kern.vty=vt` , execute `dmesg | grep 'VT('`. If the printed line looks similar to `VT(vbefb): resolution 1920x1080` then the screen resolution can be set. See `screen.textmode` and `vbe_max_resolution` in loader.conf(5).
> 
> Alternatively check the ASpeed graphics driver VBIOS and for FreeBSD. I suspect the FreeBSD driver is for Xorg, haven't checked it.


I'll check tonight.

As for the driver, I looked into that but the drivers I find, I believe are X.org drivers only and the UEFI/BIOS packages that the link directs do, look like flash updates. But my understanding could be way off, as I come from the Windows world, where a "driver" resides in an "x64" dirextory and has an *.inf extension .


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## Phishfry (Jul 7, 2022)

I have used the Aspeed Xorg driver in ports. Not that it helps your cause.
x11-drivers/xf86-video-ast/


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