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Changing the font size in FreeBSD's boot framebuffer

 ·  🎃 kr0m

The font that FreeBSD loads by default on VT terminals is usually too large, making it difficult to read. To change it, we just need to modify the screen.font parameter of the loader .

We check the available fonts:

ls -la /boot/fonts

total 204
drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel     15 Apr  9  2021 .
drwxr-xr-x  15 root  wheel     69 Nov 26 09:07 ..
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  15323 Apr  9  2021 10x18.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  15535 Apr  9  2021 10x20.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  16722 Apr  9  2021 11x22.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  17049 Apr  9  2021 12x24.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  17116 Apr  9  2021 14x28.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  20030 Apr  9  2021 16x32.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel   5859 Apr  9  2021 6x12.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  12412 Apr  9  2021 8x14.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel   6454 Apr  9  2021 8x14v.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel  12576 Apr  9  2021 8x16.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel   6513 Apr  9  2021 8x16b.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel   6555 Apr  9  2021 8x16v.fnt.gz
-r--r--r--   1 root  wheel   2099 Apr  9  2021 INDEX.fonts

We configure the desired font, in my case the smallest one:

vi /boot/loader.conf

screen.font="6x12"

We restart the system:

shutdown -r now

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