Comment 37 for bug 12637

I've been ignoring the problem for a while because I don't reboot often, but I finally decided to check the bug again to see if any progress was happening.

I tried setting vga=ask, the kernel asks what vga mode you want and you're allowed to make your choice while the screen is bright.
after making the choice (doesn't matter which one, they all seem to work) you see the "Kernel is Active" message after a second and the screen dims again.

right after that you see a [PCI] cannot allocate region (not sure what it says after that, it flashes by real fast and it may or may not be related, might be something specific to my machine)

The question I have is this: what changes between the 32bit boot code and the 64bit boot code in regards to video at that stage.. it's very early in the boot process so nothing should be poking anything, but on the other hand it's possible they stored the brightness value in some memory location that the kernel blows away during boot and it's not video related at all.

If I get the chance, I'll start throwing "got here" kprintf's in the kernel in places before "Kernel is Active" to see what I find.