I have a 9800M video card in my laptop, and have been using the nouveau driver for a while. Recently I upgraded to a git kernel + DRM module, to test out KMS. It seems to work fine when X is running, but if X isn't running the display is simply blacked out.
This is more often than not caused by disabled FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE in the kernel or (if built as module) fbcon not loaded.
Nope, my kernel is compiled with CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE=y.
The standard procedure: please provide kernel and X logs.
Never mind, it turns out uvesafb was running. I didn't expect it to run without a "video=uvesafb:..." option on the command line, but it does anyway.
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