Description:

When the boot process is just started, ("::booting 'Arch Linux'" in my particular case) and it comes to starting services, instead of continuing further, the new messages (like "Starting Initramfs") appear on top of those, which have already been written to the screen.

If I use framebuffer instead, then everything works fine (the initial messages anyway get overwritten by Initramfs starting in the fb). It seems that even if there is no vga= option in menu.lst, the kernel still "thinks" it is using the framebuffer, only the output is the standard console.

This happens with kernels 2.6.31 and .32, but not with .30. I have manually compiled several .31 and .32 vanilla kernels, but the problem still exists.
Also, this was observed without initramfs (see Arch Linux bug FS#18040). There is a suspicion that the problem can berelated to the fastboot feature, but it remains a speculation at the moment.

I am not sure that the graphics card is particularly important at this early stage, but all my machines have nVidia Geforce cards: 6100, 6150Go and GeForce4 MX 440.