[syslinux] not sure how to get rid of white screen during boot

[Douglas McClendon]

I've noticed in the last roughly year, something seems to have changed 
with with the syslinux/isolinux I've been using, causing there to be an 
unwanted flash of pure white just at the threshold of isolinux starting 
linux.  I'm using vesamenu.c32, and have played around a bit with the 
dozen or so color options.  I half suspect perhaps this is a linux KMS 
caused thing.  Though one thing that makes me less(or more?) suspicious 
of that is the fact that the white appears to be due to console text 
background color in linux, in that I've seen the white persist exactly 
to the first character of console text I see from linux, as if it is a 
console text property, reset when I first output something such that 
there is half a screen of white above if, then text with normal white on 
black.

The easiest way (perhaps) to reproduce this, is to just download the 
fedora-12 and fedora-14 i686 livecd iso images, and run them under qemu. 
  With f12, the first thing you see after you think isolinux is done, is 
a black screen with an underline cursor in the upper left.  With f14, 
you get the IMHO less nice full screen flash of white.  This is also 
visible on hardware, e.g. my netbook, though the duration will be 
subsecond versus longer than a second under qemu.

I can do more digging, but hope that someone can give me the quick 
explanation off the top of their heads.  I did scan the archives of the 
list a few months back, and saw the comment about 'vga=keep' or 
whatever, which made me think this is possibly a KMS thing, but maybe 
the same way the font persists to linux, so do console text settings?

Thanks,

-dmc