What made You think You could just kill graphics in singleuser

Dear Warner,

   after upgrading my desktop 13.5 to 14.3, it suddenly stared at me
with ascii-art, and in single-user with a horrifying 80x25 resolution.

I started to experiment. I need a proper resolution to at least get a
chance to read what the kernel tells me when booting (the mixup in
log/messages and log/console is usually not intellegible).

The functionality of the graphics options in loader.conf has always
stayed obscure to me. Between options like "kern.vt.fb.modes.HDMI-A-1"
or "vbe_max_resolution", which are hardware dependent and frequently
change, and multiple different monitors that cannot be switched off
(because even when unplugged from mains, they still babble to the
system), it is really a matter of luck to get to something useful.

So, in short, when graphics didn't appear, I started to search for my
own mistake. That it could have been turned off deliberately, was
unimaginable to me.

Only when I finally gave up that approach, and started the radical
way, install six clean new systems for analysis (13.5 and 14.3
each with MBR, GPT and EFI), I noticed that EFI would work in 14.3
(the machine is old, I didn't know it could even do EFI).

Then I started to read the published documentation, very thoroughly,
to finally find a small kind of sidenote that *might*, with some
understanding, be interpreted as a change in the singleuser hi-res.
It still didn't tell people what to do about it, but instead send
them on a paper chase into the source configuration, solveable
only for those already used to build from source.

I don't know how long it took me to read all the stuff, but I do know
that I started to put 14.3 onto the desktop around 2300, and it was
0600 when completing the hunt.
This is not acceptable.

I would have expected a prominent notice in the release notes (that
is, in each of them, not only in a single minor release), like so:

  "Single-user graphics have been removed from loader. If you
   have a graphics screen and still want to read your kernel messages
   on-screen, do this-and-that..."

And *AT LEAST* I would have expected an elaboratory notice in UPGRADING.

Cheers,
PMc