If I let KMS happen, everything that printed to the screen before the kernel enabled it is gone. And if I set a larger console font, it clears the screen again when it enters runlevel 3... <sigh> I guess that if/when I choose to use KMS with a large console font, I'm going to have to settle for dmesg... I could even put a call to dmesg in rc.local. But it wouldn't be the same as watching the screen to see if any [failed] indicators scroll by. So whether or not I disable KMS, I'm uncommenting that tty rule and reinstating my echo statement. That, will at least let me keep an eye on my rc.local initializations. {Even with KMS & larger fonts enabled...}
Hello, try to use early KMS and keymap hook in mkinitcpio. Ondrej Vadinsky -- Don't it always seem to go That you don't know what you've got Till it's gone (Joni Mitchell)