Bug#352911: [Pkg-kbd-devel] Bug#352911: setupcon: Cannot (yet) load a non-seekable RAW file

[Hans Ulrich Niedermann]

Anton Zinoviev <anton at lml.bas.bg> writes:

> On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 03:56:59PM +0100, Hans Ulrich Niedermann wrote:
>> >
>> > An user of the console-terminus reported to me about the same problem
>> > and he also used radeonfb.  It seams that radeonfb supports only fonts
>> > with 8-pixels width font matrix (like the text-mode console).
>> 
>> I have my doubts about the 8-pixel theory as the "SUN12x22" font built
>> into the kernel works just fine with radeonfb.
>> 
>> > Try sizes 14 or 16 and if necessary switch the console to lower
>> > resolution mode.
>> 
>> OK, I'll try a few different sizes.
>
> Please report your observations if you do this.  If SUN12x22 works
> then most likely there are no problems with size 24x12.

At least there should be no problems with 24x12 on the kernel side,
but this seems to boil down to a problem within consolechars(8) and
the 24x12 (and similar) fonts.

I ran this command line

    consolechars -v --tty=/dev/tty4 -f $FONTFILE

with these font files from /usr/share/consolefonts:

     Uni1-VGA8.psf.gz
     Uni1-VGA16.psf.gz
     Uni3-Terminus14.psf.gz
     Uni3-Terminus14.psf.gz
     Uni3-Terminus16.psf.gz
     Uni3-TerminusBold14.psf.gz
     Uni3-TerminusBold16.psf.gz
     Uni3-TerminusBoldVGA14.psf.gz
     Uni3-TerminusBoldVGA16.psf.gz

All of these changed the font.

However, these font files:

     Uni3-Terminus20x10.psf.gz
     Uni3-Terminus24x12.psf.gz
     Uni3-Terminus32x16.psf.gz

did not work, all resulting in the well-known error message:

     Cannot (yet) load a non-seekable RAW file
     read_simple_font(): Invalid argument

It looks to me that the font files with two numbers in their file name
contain a data format consolechars(8) cannot cope with. This implies
that there is something wrong with either consolechars(8) or the
console-terminus package.

strace output suggests that consolechars(8) does something wrong:

29446 pipe([4, 6])                      = 0
[...]
29446 close(6)
[...]
29446 _llseek(4, 0, 0xbfd4ad5c, SEEK_CUR) = -1 ESPIPE (Illegal seek)
[...]
29446 write(2, "Cannot (yet) load a non-seekable"..., 42) = 42

OK, what now? More tests? Reassign this bug to the console-tools
package?

JFTR, the package versions used for this test were:

console-data     20051214    Keymaps, fonts, charset maps, fallback tables for console-tool
console-setup    1.5         Setup the font and the keyboard on the console
console-terminus 4.16-3      Fixed-width fonts for fast reading on the Linux console
console-tools    0.2.3dbs-60 Linux console and font utilities

> On my computer if I use matroxfb then all font sizes work.  However if
> I use vga16fb instead of matroxfb then, all fonts load with no error
> messages but only with sizes 14, 16 and 32x16 the display is
> correct.

That is different from here: Here, the userspace part of loading the
font fails, probably long before any framebuffer device driver has
anything to do with it.

Gruss,

Uli