[gentoo-user] Re: No console when booting with GRUB 2?

[Nikos Chantziaras]

On 12/05/14 01:29, Mick wrote:
> On Sunday 11 May 2014 15:34:32 Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
>> Am 11.05.2014 15:36, schrieb Nikos Chantziaras:
>>> On 11/05/14 15:41, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:
>>>> I've switched from GRUB 1 to GRUB 2 and am booting in EFI mode. Now when
>>>> I boot Gentoo, I get no console. The screen is just stuck in the GRUB
>>>> screen until X11 starts. I see no kernel messages. When I press
>>>> Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a console, I only get a blank screen.
>>>>
>>>> I tried setting:
>>>>     GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text
>>>>
>>>> in /etc/default/grub, but that doesn't do anything.
>>>>
>>>> Halp! I need my consoles back!
>>>
>>> OK, figured it out. It's not possible to get a VGA text mode console
>>> with EFI. The reason is that EFI was designed by morons. The only way to
>>> get a console is to use a graphics mode framebuffer. But then my
>>> graphics driver complains:
>>>
>>> NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console
>>> NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver
>>> NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console
>>> NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in
>>> NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.
>>
>> Yep, I see that on my desktop system as well ... never really got that
>> fixed.
>
> Is this an EFI, or a NVidia problem?

Both.

EFI does not provide a VGA text mode, only BIOS does. So booting in EFI 
mode makes VGA text mode impossible to use.

Then there's NVidia, who do not officially support booting in anything 
else than VGA text mode. It seems to work fine "unofficially" though. 
I'm using the EFI console framebuffer driver. The NVidia blob complains 
about it, but it seems to work with no ill effects so far.

So you can include both the EFI design group as well as NVidia in the 
"bunch of idiots" I mentioned previously :-)