FreeBSD Is Trying To Figure Out If Anyone Uses Its VGL Graphics Library

FreeBSD VGL provides a library for accessing graphics modes and carrying out basic drawing operations atop its syscons console driver. Not only is basic graphics output on a virtual console supported by libvgl, but mouse input is too handled. However, not many people seem to be using this library.

FreeBSD developer Ed Maste sent out a message at the end of 2014 asking anyone using the VGL graphics library to contact him as he was hearing about use-cases for this library in determining the priority to port it from syscons to their newer VT console. At the moment, VGL doesn't support their newer VT console code. However, in response to his 2014 message he only received one private reply of a VGL user.

He's now sent another request looking for libvgl users. If you are a FreeBSD VGL user to please contact him and explain your case for using this library.

For those curious about libvgl, you can learn about this library via its FreeBSD man page. For Linux users it seems to be roughly similar to using ncurses+GPM on a VT console. VGL dates back to the FreeBSD 3.x days.