Using FreeBSD 10-CURRENT (2013-07-11) under Fusion 5.0.3 on OS/X 10.8.2, I have been successful in getting several different FreeBSD console sizes.
First I do this:
#!/bin/sh
vidcontrol -f 8x8 /usr/share/syscons/fonts/iso-8x8.fnt < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null 2>&1
vidcontrol -f 8x14 /usr/share/syscons/fonts/iso-8x14.fnt < /dev/ttyv0 > /dev/null 2>&1
-- else the other modes fail with bad fonts. Redirection is so this can run from an rc script or inbound ssh or whatever.
[Note: this is probably better configured by putting:
font8x8="iso-8x8"
font8x14="iso8x14"
into /etc/rc.conf; I can't do this because my VM's rc.conf file gets overwritten by my project's build, which is an own-goal that I can't fix right now...]
Then all of these work:
vidcontrol MODE_3 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x25, 8x8 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_22 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x25, 8x14 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_24 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x25, 8x16 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_32 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x30, 8x16 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_112 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x43, 8x8 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_30 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x50, 8x8 char cell
vidcontrol MODE_34 < /dev/ttyv0 # 80x60, 8x8 char cell
==================
Unfortunately this does not solve the problem I was trying to solve, which is: make the FreeBSD console window very small, but completely visible, without doing OS/X window-size dragging. Because: I'm doing FreeBSD kernel development and crashing the VM a lot. Each time it reboots, VMware VBIOS resets the mode, which undoes my window-size dragging.
The 80x25, 8x14 mode helps a bit -- it's slightly smaller than the default 8x16.
Sadly, 80x25, 8x8 doesn't help. Someone, and I think it's VMware, is line-doubling the 8x8 cell. So I get all the massive ugliness of 8x8 chars plus all the space consumption of 8x16.
Can someone @VMware please do something about the 640x200 (80x25 8x8) text mode being line-doubled? Is there a seekrit .vmx file option that makes it stop?
It would also be nice if windows remembered their manually dragged position and scaling. I'm doing kernel/network development with a network of three VMs. I want their consoles neatly arranged one above the other, drag-scaled down about 30% so they all fit nicely with no overlap. I can *do* the positioning and scaling, but every time I reboot the VMs I get to manually re-scale their console windows.
>Bela<