It's an old/good trick. The linux kernel offers an ioctl to set the font tables, and has for years. I think the kms people want to remove them which is a little sad.

Until then you can also use a tool called SVGATextMode to set the registers and get 80x50 or even a 160x100. I still think text-mode is great. I don't know very much about FreeBSD; I last used OpenBSD almost 20 years ago. Before Linux my unix was Solaris or SCO.

These days, I have a tegra (nvidia arm64) system and it still has a x86 vga bios in there(!!!) so linux actually ships an x86 emulator to "read" the outb/w instructions. Amazing.