Re: qemu and Unicode characters on serial console

[Jakob Bohm]

On 2021-03-14 11:10, Francois wrote:
> Hi qemu! I am wondering if it is possible to get Unicode support
> through a stdio, or pty, serial console.
> I am running qemu from CentOS stream
> qemu-kvm-core-4.2.0-35.module_el8.4.0+547+a85d02ba.x86_64
> My terminal and locale use UTF-8.
> I am booting into the OVMF boot menu below, that lets me change the
> language to French, however characters like é è ç are badly rendered.
> I would expect the UEFI shell "edit" command to support unicode
> characters but I cannot test this either.
> My goal is to use Unicode characters in the boot entries (or "options
> de bottes" as it is funnily translated today) so they look nice.
>
> ```
> /usr/libexec/qemu-kvm \
> -m 512M \
> -net none \
> -machine q35 \
> -pflash ./OVMF_CODE.secboot.fd \
> -pflash ./OVMF_VARS.fd \
> -serial stdio \
> -debugcon file:debug.log -global isa-debugcon.iobase=0x402
> ```
>
> Cheers
You need to consider which character encoding the UEFI BIOS code
assumes for the serial port.

Obvious possibilities that could all be used with French:

1. UTF-8
2. ISO8859-1
3. ISO8859-15 (same as -1, except the code for the Euro symbol)
4. MS1252 (Same as -1, but extra characters, including the Euro
  symbol on an unused number)
5. IBM 437 (Used by the oldest IBM BIOS)
6. IBM 850 (Fewer graphics characters for menus, more accented
  letters)

If the UEFI BIOS uses one of these, but the software processing
the serial output uses a different one, the result is very ugly
MojiBake.

Enjoy

Jakob
--
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S.  https://www.wisemo.com
Transformervej 29, 2860 Søborg, Denmark.  Direct +45 31 13 16 10
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