These changes require you to recompile your kernel.

- Change the colors, add this to your kernel configuration.


options SC_KERNEL_CONS_ATTR=(FG_LIGHTRED|BG_BLACK)
options SC_KERNEL_CONS_REV_ATTR=(FG_BLACK|BG_RED)

This will set a light red kernel foreground output and black background.
If you want to emulate NetBSD colors, use a green foreground :P

colors are from a raw palette in C. ( u_char palette[256 * 3]; (syscons.h)

- Change the kernel font, add this in your kernel configuration:

options SC_DFLT_FONT
makeoptions SC_DFLT_FONT=iso15-thin

I wanted to have a thin font for kernel messages.

It failed the first time I ran it, saying I didn't have a font.h. We'll generate the font manually.

I found the part talking about our font.h missing in the kernel source:
(/usr/src/sys/conf/files.i386)

-- change this:
font.h optional sc_dflt_font \
compile-with "uudecode < /usr/share/syscons/fonts/${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16.fnt && file2c 'static u_char dflt_font_16[16*256] = {' '};' < ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16 > font.h && uudecode < /usr/share/syscons/fonts/${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x14.fnt && file2c 'static u_char dflt_font_14[14*256] = {' '};' < ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x14 >> font.h && uudecode < /usr/share/syscons/fonts/${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x8.fnt && file2c 'static u_char dflt_font_8[8*256] = {' '};' < ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x8 >> font.h" \
no-obj no-implicit-rule before-depend \
clean "font.h ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x14 ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16 ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x8"
#
-- to this:
font.h optional sc_dflt_font \
compile-with "uudecode < /usr/share/syscons/fonts/${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16.fnt && file2c 'static u_char dflt_font_16[16*256] = {' '};' < ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16 > font.h" \
no-obj no-implicit-rule before-depend \
#clean "font.h ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x14 ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x16 ${SC_DFLT_FONT}-8x8"
#

Now we must generate the font.h file with the instructions found above:

uudecode < /usr/share/syscons/fonts/iso15-thin-8x16.fnt > ~/font.h

then we convert this file to a c file:

file2c 'static u_char dflt_font_16[16*256] = {' '};' < iso15-thin-8x16 > font.h

then we can move the font.h file to /usr/src/sys/dev/syscons and compile the kernel. The font won't look as thin as normally because the framebuffer size during boot is fixed at 640x380 but it still looks much nicer.