From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: Booting with the GRUB line kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.648_EL ro root=LABEL=/RHEL4b2 vga=788 1 gives no display on the console. This works in RHEL3WS and FC3 to give a 37 row by 101 column character display [and single user mode]. The harddrive activity light flashes as during a successful boot, but the console display contains nothing [although it is not "blanked": the LCD backlight is on.] Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.9-1.648_EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot with "vga=788 1" instead of "rhgb quiet". 2. 3. Actual Results: Console display is empty: all black, not even a cursor (but the LCD backlight is on.) Expected Results: Console display contains boot commentary, and eventually a root shell prompt "# ". Additional info: Video card is ATI Technologies Inc Rage 128 Pro Ultra TF (1002:5446; 174b:7106) and /etc/sysconfig/hwconf says it uses fb0.
thats very odd, as FC3 is pretty much the same kernel.
Using "vga=ask 1" works, mostly. The 37x101 mode is not listed, not even after entering "scan" and waiting a minute for the new list to appear. The closest mode is "8 030A 132x43", and entering "8\r" does give 43 rows by 132 columns, UNTIL "Setting default font (latarcyrheb-sun16)" changes it to 25 rows. (The number of columns after the change to 25 rows is too tedious to count, but looks like more than 100 and less than 132.) ["vga=ask" works just like this in RHEL3 and FC3.] Rechecking, "vga=788 1" does give 37x101 in RHEL3 (2.4.21-20.EL) and FC3 (2.6.9-1.678_FC3), but gives an empty black screen in RHEL4-Beta2. Typing "reboot\r" succeeds in getting back to the BIOS and GRUB.
Still fails after up2date to today's kernel-2.6.9-1.675_EL. Also, booting the FC3 kernel-2.6.9-1.678_FC3 using the RHEL4-Beta2 root filesystem _works_ with "vga=788 1". So something between 675_EL and 678_FC3 is the problem.
fixed in cvs
Closing out. Please reopen if the problem is still present with recent code.