GRUB video mode setting (this time, the hard rock version)

[Colin Watson]

See https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-July/030995.html
for our last attempt at this.

Once again, we've enabled gfxpayload=keep in GRUB to see if we can get
to the point of having (nearly?) flicker-free boot on a wide swathe of
hardware for Natty.  In fact, we did this in grub2
1.99~20101124-1ubuntu1 on 24 Nov, but I'm just getting round to
announcing it.  We'll be making a few extra changes before Christmas in
order to make the GRUB->Plymouth transition visually smoother, without a
black screen in between.

The kernel team has already managed to isolate one major cause of
failures in this environment and get it fixed upstream, namely
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/683775; this happened to Intel users
because the pipes and planes ended up not being connected up properly.
This was fixed in linux 2.6.37-8.20, so make sure your kernel is at
least that recent.

If you find that your screen stays black or is corrupted on boot with
these changes, please report a bug on the Ubuntu kernel (using
'ubuntu-bug linux') and add the 'kernel-key-gfxpayload' tag.  You can
work around it temporarily by setting GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text in
/etc/default/grub and running 'sudo update-grub', but we still want the
bug reports because that way we might be able to fix them properly.  If
all else fails, we now have a mechanism that should allow us to
blacklist individual cards that have problems with this system.

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]