Solved! It turns out I haven't selected fbcon in the kernel config. So this is really a bug in the kernel build system: drm + kms should autoselect fbcon.
Posted Jan 30, 2010 11:36 UTC (Sat) by chris.wilson (subscriber, #42619)
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It does, but only if you have not also selected to optimize for small/embedded systems where you can opt out of the overhead of allocating a framebuffer for the console.
config DRM_KMS_HELPER
tristate
depends on DRM
select FB
select FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE if !EMBEDDED