On Tue, Jan 27, 2026 at 03:21:36AM +0100, Kirill A. Korinsky wrote:
> The fallback forces VGA text mode even when the VGA probe fails, that
> guaranteeing an early console, so boot can proceed even if GOP is absent
> and no GPU driver is available.

With this patch, the kernel will be writing to memory locations and I/O ports
that are traditionally associated with VGA hardware, despite no VGA hardware
(or emulation thereof), necessarily being present.

Whilst it fixes your machine, how confident can we be that this is harmless on
others?

It's perfectly valid to have no graphics hardware at all and run entirely from
a serial console, so this could plausibly break machines that are currently
working just fine.