After much debugging it appears that grub may not be handing off the console in graphics mode at all. Booting with gfxpayload=keep seems to work pretty well.
Looking like the blacklisting is not working correctly:
grub> hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3 error: incompatible licence
Adding a task on grub2 to investigate.
After much debugging it appears that grub may not be handing off the console in graphics mode at all. Booting with gfxpayload=keep seems to work pretty well.
Looking like the blacklisting is not working correctly:
grub> hwmatch ${prefix} /gfxblacklist. txt 3
error: incompatible licence
Adding a task on grub2 to investigate.