[PATCH] VGA console font problems on 2.6 kernel

[PATCH] VGA console font problems on 2.6 kernel

From: Egbert Eich <eich@suse.de>

I would like to utilize kernel ioctls to save/restore console fonts
in VGA text mode when running X. So far the Xserver takes care of this
however there more and more problems with this:
        1. On some platforms (IA64) we need to POST the BIOS before
	   we even have a chance to access the hardware ourselves.
	   This POSTing will usually undo any changes to the graphics
	   hardware that the kernel may have done.
	2. More and more drivers fully rely on BIOS support however
	   the BIOS functions which could be used to save/restore
	   register settings may be broken so the only way of mode
	   save/restore is getting/setting the BIOS mode ID.

I've hacked up some code for X however I ran into two problems:

1. con_font_get() in linux/drivers/char/vt.c seems to be broken as
   the font parameters (height, width, charcount) are never reported
   back. Therefore this function seems to be pretty useless.
   The fix is simple (please see below).

2. fb consoles seem to allow to install fonts per vt so that the user
   can have a different font on every console. The text console driver
   doesn't support this: the font is downloaded to the video card
   and will be used for all systems. Still the vga_con driver stores
   the font parameters per console with the effect that setting a
   font with different parameters on one console will result in the
   wron values when this font information is read back from another
   console.
   Appearantly this broken feature has been introduced in 2.6 as
   in the 2.4 kernel the vga_con font information is stored in one
   single global variable.

The IA64 platform at least still heavily relies on the VGA text console.
To be able to fix some VT switching issues with X on this platform I
need these two issues resolved.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>