Comment 52 for bug 246269

@captn: Thanks for reminding me; I actually put in an /etc/modprobe/uvesafb install scriptlet, so it's run automatically whenever uvesafb is loaded.

@everyone else:

On my machine (Dell Latitude D620 with intel 945GM video) I couldn't get uvesafb to start during the boot. The module got loaded, but dmesg had:
[ 2.170230] uvesafb: Getting VBE info block failed (eax=0x4f00, err=-3)
[ 2.170303] uvesafb: vbe_init() failed with -22
[ 2.170360] uvesafb: probe of uvesafb.0 failed with error -22

However, after the boot I could rmmod & modprobe it again, and it worked correctly. So I tried stepping through the init script (using "panic" between the steps), and tried modprobing it by hand. I noticed that it refuses to work unless it's started _after_ udev in init-premount. No idea why, but maybe this gives someone a hint where to look.

(If you just want a workaround, add an entry in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount that has "udev" as a prerequisite, and put something like "sleep 2; modprobe -r uvesafb; modprobe uvesafb" as the action. The sleep is to allow udev to fire its events. I found the -r needed because uvesafb is triggered earlier in by init process, and it just stands there looking silly...)