Created attachment 206008 [details] Image of console exhibiting issue. I was installing a VM last night under QEMU/KVM with OVMF for purposes of looking at offline VM migration between this environment and Bhyve, and I thought at first that my VM had locked up. RhodiumToad from Freenode suggested that it hadn't locked up, but that it was using a console I wasn't looking at, and he nailed it - I was able to interact on the VM's serial console. I noted this behaviour on install disks from all of: 11.3-RELEASE, 12.0-RELEASE, 12-STABLE, and 13-CURRENT. Trying the 11.2-RELEASE install disk, the efifb is used by default. Something I noted was that 11.2-RELEASE shows the Beastie logo in colour, whereas the newer installers show it in black and white. Another slight oddity is that when I opted for a live session from the serial console, I noticed a functional getty showing up on the efifb, so it seems like the efifb works but simply isn't preferred under 11.3 and newer. While this behaviour is pretty easy to accomodate, it was surprising, and I didn't know to look at the serial console at first. I haven't tracked down just why it's happening, but I'd be happy to help explore this. I've attached an image of the efifb console at the point when the system starts using the serial console exclusively.
CC imp; I suspect this to be the result of console detection changes in efiland.
As a random additional note, it's conceivably specific to OVMF, as I've got EFI installs of 12 on two bare-metal systems here that didn't exhibit this behaviour.
Additional notes: Not sure where this behaviour lies, but virt-manager has an option for opening the serial console which fails, and which precludes subsequent attempts to open the serial console via other methods. More notable and interesting, once the VM is completely installed, it retains this behaviour, ignoring the efifb and using the serial console, except that as noted previously, a functioning getty does spawn on the efifb.
I'm closing this, as I've reported it again in 241036, and it's seeing attention there. I evidently forgot I'd opened this one here. Ah, well. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 241036 ***