?victory is mine! ?just built a new kernel from latest git pull,
changed nothing, installed, booted and it works. ?no idea what's
changed or what fixed it.

Confirmed! I had the same problem on my two intel machines. At first I
thought it was a misconfiguration of mine (X started and virtual
consoles worked from then on, but I had no boot messages after the
initial kernel mode setting). Glad to see this fixed.

Alex.