Folks, I am attempting to figure out what boot_mute wants me to do. I'm trying to make a "laptop guide" and I'm confused. I'm not a C programmer at this scale of sophistication so there's a decent chance I'm foolishly making an error, but current is not doing what I expect.
- boot_mute doesn't appear in [loader.conf(8)][1] - In the defaults/loader.conf file it [appears][2] and says: that it exists to mute the console. I daresay that it's doing more than that, because activating it puts a logo + beastie orb on the screen. Question: Should the comment be updated? - The only other mention of boot_mute is on the line that specifies that the overlay image can be controlled through configuration of the [splash] value implying that instead of using the encoded array of unsigned char in the kernel at https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/vt/logo/logo_beastie.c. Whoa! A nice configurable option? Nice. Looking at the git history on that file it appears to be part of splash(4). And /that/ document says ..."work with syscons(4) only". OK so maybe that comment in defaults also needs updating? Because... - My impression is that vt(4) is the way forward at present which means that I was following a bad path and we're /back/ to using the [in-kernel defined image][3] for the splash screen that's triggered by boot_mute? I really don't understand the image packing as chars well enough to reverse how to create a BMP from an array of hex values, but, eh...is this the one that's being shown? Seems like it. There's also quite a bit of logic inside of sys/dev/vt/vt_cpulogos.c[3] that suggests that it's trying to use arrays of chars as overlay. OK, so AFAICT, there are two terminal rendering systems, under-/mis-documented loader.conf flags, and two places where images are defined: in the vt device directory and the images/ directory. Question: Can anyone confirm / deny my assessment? After all that I'm still a bit confused as to what the expected/desired behavior is. Can anyone help me figure out what the desired behavior is (and maybe I can update the comments)? My current plan is to turn the array into 0x00 and see what happens, but I'd like to know how I can turn the results of that experiment into a patch. Best, Steven [1]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/stand/defaults/loader.conf.5 [2]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/283be95ea29abd7f867e4084bafe368c47f6c038/stand/defaults/loader.conf#L134 [splash]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/283be95ea29abd7f867e4084bafe368c47f6c038/stand/defaults/loader.conf#L30 [3]: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/sys/dev/vt/vt_cpulogos.c#L79-L91 --- Public Key: 22BE39E2FA68D8BA8DC4B43A55A16D8CE2B036DE Messages from this account are considered the best-secured and most reliable. Send information regarding health, wealth, or requiring higher standards of security to this address. Sent with [Proton Mail](https://proton.me/mail/home) secure email.
