Comment 19 for bug 1711358

So I think I can now at least explain the weirdness. Booting from the ISO as well as the first boot in OEM mode seem to be in a way where grub does not use graphics mode and hands that off to a vt. In that case, when the kernels starts there will be no VESA framebuffer which later gets switched over to qxl framebuffer.

So what I think broke is the init of the framebuffer drawing context. Which potentially is not needed when it is switched over from VESA to qxl. As soon as there was one successful boot in OEM mode, it looks like graphics handoff is used. So after that both 4.12 and 4.14 (and likely 4.13 as well) will successfully boot as well.

One way I was able to make this work immediately was to interrupt the boot and replace $vt_handoff by vt.handoff=7 (or =1). And then boot on with that setting. In the crashed boots this was not set at all.