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

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 02/19/2011 03:17 PM, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> 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?

This seems to happen when you use "quiet" but not "vga=current".

	-hpa