Installing drm-kmod on FreeBSD and Increasing Console Font

I recently reinstalled FreeBSD on my X1 Carbon 6th.

Since I’ll be doing a lot of traveling overseas soon and needed a few vital programs that aren’t available on OpenBSD, it had to be done.

I decided this time to document various stages of my setup for people who asked.

So this post will cover a simple step and one of the first things I do.

Since the X1 Carbon has a resolution of 2560x1440, the console is almost impossible to work on.

It’s tiny.

Go ahead and install drm-kmod.

I use drm-current-kmod but you can also use drm-fbsd12.0-kmod.

pkg install drm-current-kmod

Edit your rc.conf:

kld_list="/boot/modules/i915kms.ko"

Then go ahead and edit your loader.conf:

#Font size
kern.vt.fb.default_mode="1280x720"

To get that resolution (or change it), use a resolution calculator like this one.

That way you can get a lower resolution that fits your screen nicely.

You might as well also add these lines to your loader.conf:

#DRM
drm.i915.enable_rc6=7
drm.i915.semaphores="1"
drm.i915.enable_fbc="1"

Reboot.

The console will still be tiny until the module is loaded. Then it’ll change to your new res.

Enjoy.

I’ll cover X in another post.