Couldn't this be done automatically via the vesa driver?
You mean VBE (VESA BIOS Extension)? No, unfortunately not. VBE is relatively useless nowadays.
VBE is a very old standard, dating back to the middle of the 90s of the previous century. It was created in order to have a common API when (literally) hundreds of graphics card manufacturers started selling cards that were incompatible with each other. In particular, this was an issue for 16bit DOS software because DOS didn’t have its own graphics interface, so every piece of software had to ship its own drivers for all kinds of graphics hardware. Thanks to VBE, they had to ship only one driver. Later, the standard was improved to incorporate functions for “protected mode” and 32bit software, but operating systems like Windows or Mac-OS provide their own graphics API (DirectX, OpenGL, …), so applications don’t use VBE anymore.
So, with the decline of DOS, the VESA standard became mostly superfluous, and graphics hardware vendors started neglecting it. Today, many graphics cards don’t have a VBE anymore, so the “vesa driver” doesn’t work. That’s the case for my Nvidia 1030, for example.
Apart from that, the list of video modes supported by VBE is usually a fixed list (hardcoded in the graphics hardware’s BIOS ROM), i.e. it does not dynamically adapt to the monitor that is connected. For this reason, it supports only a certain set of standard resolutions, usually not including things like UWQHD displays like mine (3440×1440).
I mean, there is some way (EDID, DisplayID, ...) that xorg uses to find out the monitor's native resolution.
And then simply use this?
That’s not possible for Nvidia GPUs because they’re not KMS-based.
However, combining this with appropriately larger-sized fonts would probably be a must!
Yes, of course, FreeBSD already has a selection of fonts, including larger ones (32 pixels) for screens with high DPI. You can use the
vidfont(1) command to select a font from a list.
You can also create your own font files for use with
vt(4): Either export an existing X11 font with
x11/fstobdf or
x11-fonts/pcf2bdf, or use one of the various X11 font editors to modify an existing font or create your own one from scratch, then save it in BDF format. Once you have a BDF file, you can convert it to a
*.fnt file usable with
vt(4) with FreeBSD’s
vtfontcvt(8) tool. Then you can load the font with the
vidcontrol(1) command. In order to have it in the selection list of the
vidfont(1) tool, put the
*.fnt file in the
/usr/share/vt/fonts directory and add an entry to the
INDEX.fonts file (it’s an ASCII file, so you can use a standard text editor). By the way, BDF files are also ASCII files, so you can look at them with
less(1), for example, if you’re curious.
