NAME

biosfont —

retrieve font bitmaps from BIOS memory

SYNOPSIS

/dev/biosfont

DESCRIPTION

The special file /dev/biosfont is an interface to retrieve font bitmaps from the BIOS memory. The fonts represented are the native system fonts. The complete ASCII set (256 characters) can be retrieved.

IOCTL INTERFACE

The characters can be retrieved using the ioctl() call. The parameters are:

BIOSFONT_ASCII

The call identifier for to use for biosfont calls.

&ch

A reference to an instance of t_biosfont which is defined in the header file. t_biosfont has two fields:

u_char bitmap[8]: The output, contains the bitmap scanlines. The top scanline is stored in bitmap[0], the bottom scanline is stored in bitmap[7]. The scanlines themselves are stored little endian (MSB first).
u_char nr: ASCII code of character to retrieve, range is bound to 0 <= nr <= 255

COMPATIBILITY

Due to a braindead endianness implementation the driver is only guaranteed to work on i386 and amd64 architectures. These are also the only architectures known to the author to actually have the bitmap fonts.

FILES

/usr/local/include/biosfont.h: The header file to include when accessing the driver.
/dev/biosfont: The device node for the driver.
/boot/modules/biosfont.ko: The kernel module to load when using the driver.

HISTORY

The biosfont driver was first written in August 2003, and rewritten in April 2006 when the original sources were lost (oops). It was released to the public on May 7, 2006.

Patches can be send to the author Rene Ladan ⟨r.c.ladan@gmail.com⟩.