console corruption issues and solution

[psy0rz]

ZFSBootMenu build source

Release EFI

ZFSBootMenu version

2.3.0

Boot environment distribution

Alpine

Problem description

On an older box (HP microserver gen 8) i had some console font corruption issues.

After hours of debugging i found the solution(s):

1. (not a zfsbootmenu issue) I had to blacklist the radeon module, otherwise there would be no output at all at a certain point.
2. Using boot parameter zbm.autosize=0 made the issue better: This prevents the whole screen from shifting/wrapping up 3 rows.
3. Using boot parameter rd.vconsole.font=none solved the characters from being corrupt. (autosize=0 isnt needed anymore at this point)

So i would suggest making rd.vconsole.font=none a suggestion as default option, in case people experience these problems.

I cant believe how much stuff i had to do to get simple console output on this box :)

Steps to reproduce

1. Insist on using too obsolete hardware
2. Be stubborn.

[zdykstra]

I'm not quite clear where you blacklisted radeon. That shouldn't be part of any release images specifically because GPUs rarely handle being reinitialized by the kernel in the boot environment.

We do have a wiki 'quirks' page that would be a good place to add an entry for your specific hardware. Right now, there isn't a great place on our docs.zfsboot.menu site for that. It'll take some wrangling to find a place for it.

[psy0rz]

The radeon problem had nothing to do with zfsbootmenu but made stuff a lot harder to debug.