Kernel: 2.6.19 (latest stable 2006-11-29 22:22 UTC)

This is the first time I'm trying out vga console (let alone the 2.6 kernel [coming from 2.4.27 that ships with Debian Sarge 3.1]).

I've added vga=3841 (which equates to mode 0x0f01, 80x50) to my boot kernel command line and the first blob of info starting after "Uncompressing kernel..." is in the correct vga mode, but then a couple of seconds later, the screen sort of like resets and is back in text mode (80x25). The problem with this is that the physical screen is like a viewport and does not show everything (it seems there's one extra text line above the top of the monitor, and one extra one below). But I'm guessin gthis behavior is due to the video mode reset which is what I'm trying to prevent.

My question is: what causes it to reset? What kernel (compile & runtime) options do I need to correctly get a hi-res vga console (docs/svga.txt doesn't anything about my problem)

I am using an initrd, video card is GeForce2 (32MB) [riva is the only fb module I chose]

Similar but never-resolved thread

Edit: resolved:

video=vesafb:1024x768

was what is needed instead of vga=

You are correct that changes to video-mode during the boot sequence can cause the "pretty boot-time face" screen to drop.

The pretty-picture window is usually set up by an initrd ("inital ramdisk") program which runs first. The video parameters must be set by that program and they must not change.