elilo virtual terminal instability - has anybody seen this?!
 

this is a bit odd. i recently purchased a new custom gaming rig (Rog strix z390-e gaming m.b. 16 gigs of ram
and an geforce rtx 2060). I was finally able to install slackware current (for the newer hardware support),
despite a few hiccups (it's current after all) i Got it working ok except for the virtual terminal switching: ctrl + alt + f2(and fkey variants except f1 and f7) and then back to ctrl + alt + f7, which resulted in a black screen and nvrm xvid error (13 or 8). So the gpu stops rendering. Seemed messed up
until i realized that it only happened with elilo not grub ...
When i booted up and ran it with grub from linuxmint or slackware so far no more v.t. switching or nvrm xvid
errors. Now i am just wondering why this would be. When i use a "geforce gtx 1050 ti" i do not get this problem with slackware, just the geforce rtx 2060 on slackware although grub stabilizes it. I guess you could say i am sold on grub and even managed to get a slackware theme working logo and all.

I had the same issue, and others have too. Elilo doesn't seem to work in some setups, resulting in these odd video behaviors. I found that despite the black screen, I could still enter commands after switching to the tty, so it was purely a video problem. Refind was one solution, but finally I just made peace with Grub2 (as you said). I can't say it's a perfect friendship, but I have grown to respect Grub2, but it was a non-trivial commitment to really learn its ins and outs.

Sounds like an nvdia driver bug too me. I'm just taking a wild guess of a jab tho; based on my experience in the past -- I had a Macbook pro 13" mid 2010 which had a 320m nvidia in it. Someone had found a way to work around a nvidia driver bug that exists; which doesn't sound too different then what your describing here. I think using grub as a band-aid is a poor solution, but I digress.

Maybe in this case, but I think that more generally grub can easily replace lilo as well as elilo without any other issue than having to learn how it works. Even more so with its version 2.04 expected in the coming days.

Grub sure can, I have no doubts. I, for one, however, am glad elilo and lilo are the defaults in Slackware.

I agree, Grub2 is not a work-around, it's just a better bootloader. Elilo for all its charm ceased development in 2015. Even if nvidia is to blame (and that's not for certain), the fact that Grub2 can handle these foibles only speaks to it having additional value.

Well the nice thing about all this is grub2 is now included in Slackware. Its fairly simple to switch to your bootloader of choice.

Glad i am not the only one
 

Yeah it's good i am not the only one who has had this vt switching bug. Still i would like to know why so this can be resolved more effectively.
Possibly it loads bios files that elilo does not. Strange, perhaps the grub people will know why.
Presently i am running a recent grub-2.02 an a slackware-current (beta 15, but i hope for not much longer).

Using elilo here and do not have any issues, but I am not running any Nvidia stuff.