gfx: one glyph blitter, and a terminal cell is a surface

Gate 0's last item, "delete the cell grid" -- done as far as it should be, and
the rest of it retired, which is the part worth explaining.

include/text.h made the case against the grid in four charges: it cannot do
variable-width glyphs, cannot position text off a multiple of eight, cannot
anti-alias, and cannot hold a codepoint above 255. Every one of those was
about the *drawing layer*, and every one is now false -- glyphs carry metrics,
PSOGM positions text at arbitrary pixels, the TrueType path blends 8-bit
coverage, and vtcell.ch is a uint32.

What is left is a grid in vt.c, and deleting that would not modernise the
console; it would stop it being a terminal. VT100 escapes address columns,
TIOCGWINSZ reports rows and columns, and every program that draws a box
assumes both. So the item is checked with its remainder rewritten to say what
was actually wrong, rather than ticked as if the original wording had been
carried out.

**What was actually wrong was the duplicate.** gfx.c walked font_data and
blitted glyphs its own way; text.c did the same job into a struct surface, for
no caller but a sysrq self-test. Two implementations of bearings, coverage and
clipping, which had to agree about a cell size only one of them was told had
changed -- and they did not agree, which is why every line of PSOGM once drew
the next character's bitmap underneath itself.

There is one now, and the mechanism is the pleasing part: the console hands
text_draw_glyph() **the cell as a surface of its own** -- same pixels, same
stride, origin moved and bounds set to that cell. Clipping a tall ascender to
its line is then the same bounds check that clips to the edge of a screen, and
there is no second notion of clipping in the tree. `surface_sub()` is six
lines and replaced fourteen of hand-written comparisons.

The bitmap is reached through font_builtin() like any other provider, so the
early console and the real one are one path with different metrics, and the
`if (!cfont)` branch that walked the array is gone. gfx.c no longer includes
font.h; text.c does, being the only file left that reads it -- which also
retires the note in text.c explaining why it could not.

struct surface gained a bpp, because gfx_draw_pixel handles 16, 24 and 32 and
whatever replaces it has to as well. Zero means 32: a UEFI GOP has no other
format and the loader publishes 32 unconditionally, so callers that do not
care say nothing.

One behaviour change, and it is the documented one: a codepoint the font
cannot draw is now a substituted glyph rather than a blank cell. text.h argues
for that directly -- "a missing glyph that draws nothing makes text silently
shorter and the fault impossible to see".

Verified by screendump: the console renders correctly, PSOGM renders
correctly, and `echo t > /proc/sysrq` still draws its specimen through the
surface path with the back buffer at 32bpp. Both supported configurations: one
boot each, no traps, no panics, socktest and memfdtest green.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-09-23 17:57:16 +02:00
commit c84d06c5b1
6 changed files with 183 additions and 72 deletions

View file

@ -252,10 +252,33 @@ These are the galling ones — the replacement exists, is tested, and is unused.
was **one byte** holding a CP437 index, so `Ą` (U+0104) could not be
*stored*, whatever was drawing it. The cell is a `uint32` codepoint now
and the cell size comes from the font's measured advance.
- [ ] **Delete the cell grid.** The other half of the original item, and still
open. The console is a fixed grid of codepoints; `text.c`'s proportional
path has no caller. Nothing needs this before the compositor, which is
why it is separated from the row above rather than left blocking it.
- [x] ~~**Delete the cell grid.**~~ Done as far as it should be done, and the
rest of it retired — which needs explaining, because the item as written
asked for something a terminal cannot be.
`include/text.h` made the case against the grid in four charges: it
cannot do variable-width glyphs, cannot position text off a multiple of
eight, cannot anti-alias, and cannot hold a codepoint above 255. **All
four were about the drawing layer, and all four are now false** — glyphs
carry metrics, PSOGM positions text at arbitrary pixels, the TrueType
path blends 8-bit coverage, and `vtcell.ch` is a `uint32`.
What is left is a grid in `vt.c`, and that one is not in the way: it is
what a terminal *is*. VT100 escapes address columns, `TIOCGWINSZ`
reports rows and columns, and every program that draws a box assumes
both. Deleting it would not modernise the console, it would stop it
being a terminal.
So the real remainder was the duplicate: `gfx.c` walked `font_data`
itself and blitted glyphs its own way, while `text.c` did the same job
into a `struct surface` for nobody but a self-test. Two implementations
that had to agree about a cell size only one of them was told had
changed — and they did not agree, which is why every line of PSOGM once
drew the next character's bitmap underneath itself. There is one blitter
now: `gfx.c` hands `text_draw_glyph` the cell *as a surface of its own*,
so clipping a tall glyph to its line is the same bounds check that clips
to a screen. The bitmap is reached through `font_builtin()` like any
other provider, and `gfx.c` no longer includes `font.h`.
- [x] ~~**Load a font from disk**~~ and point the console at it. The built-in
one is linked in on purpose — an early panic has to be readable — so this
is about a *replaceable* font, not about having one. Drop a TrueType file