when I do reboot out of GUI, screen is switched to vt1 but output goes to vt7 (where X is running) so nothing is visible. This is both without bootsplash under 2.6 and with bootsplash under 2.4
also during boot under 2.6 I see error "/proc/splash does not exist". You can't assume splash is available or even compiled in kernel. This is somewhere between rc.sysinit and before rc starts normal scripts.