EXOTIC SILICON
“Text console looking a bit drab? Not anymore!”
Our console enhancement patchset updated for OpenBSD 7.7-release
Add these features to your OpenBSD 7.7 console!
  • 256 colors
  • Dim text
  • Invisible text
  • Double underline
  • Strike-through
  • True bold font rendering
  • Italic text
  • Keyboard control sequences that better match Xterm
Ready to catch up with the latest version of our console patchset?
If you've used previous versions of the code, everything should feel quite familiar - the changes are mostly technical to make it compatible with OpenBSD 7.7.
The main changes are:
  • Bold and italic font creation is now done within rasops32.c on first use of the corresponding font variant, instead of within wsfont.c, (and it is now expected to work on machines where it didn't work before).
  • Screenshot functionality has been removed from this patchset, as it is now being maintained as a separate codebase.
Download the patchset here
Still using the default website theme? There are ten to choose from!
Usage notes
Only 32-bit rasops-based displays are supported by this code.
The kernel patches add the basic raw support for interpreting various new console control sequences, but for userland programs to make use of this enhanced functionality it will usually be necessary to set the TERM environment variable to an appropriate value, such as xterm or xterm-256color:
$ export TERM=xterm-256color
This can obviously be set in /etc/ttys as the default terminal emulation if you decide to use the patches on an ongoing basis.
This version of the patchset applies to OpenBSD 7.7-release, so ensure that you have the source code tree for OpenBSD 7.7-release in /usr/src/sys/ before starting.
If you don't already have our signify key, download it to /etc/signify/ so that you can verify the signature on the patchset before applying it:
# ftp -o /etc/signify/exoticsilicon.pub https://research.exoticsilicon.com/local_patchsets/exoticsilicon.pub
Downloading and applying the patchset is then quite straightforward:
# cd /root
# ftp https://research.exoticsilicon.com/downloads/console_patches_77.sig
# cd /usr/src
# signify -Vep /etc/signify/exoticsilicon.pub -x /root/console_patches_77.sig -m - | patch
Finally, just re-compile the kernel, re-boot, and enjoy!