Hey folks, I've been working hard on vesafb lately. It's finally in a 
state where I'm ready for comments. What the patch adds:

  * Shadow framebuffer support in rasops; improves scrolling speed
    significantly if no hardware support is available, at the expense of
    additional memory usage.
  * Splash screen support (w/ optional progress bar), shown in place of
    the kernel text at boot time. Enabled with options SPLASH (and options
    SPLASH_PROGRESS)
  * Reference VESA framebuffer driver for i386, that uses the above
    features. Supports 8, 16, 32bpp and uses the shadow framebuffer.
    Requires VBE 2.0 or above (for linear framebuffer access).
  * Patches wsdisplay to prevent multiple children from claiming to be
    'console'. This allows us to have both wsdisplay@vesafb and
    wsdisplay@vga in the same kernel. The first one to successfully attach
    a console "wins".

The patch is available here:

  http://www.invisible.ca/~jmcneill/netbsd/vesa/vesafb-20060214.tar.gz

More information (including a video of the splash screen in action):

  http://www.invisible.ca/core/VESA_Framebuffer_console_in_NetBSD

I'd like to get this code in at some point in the near future (of course, 
with options SPLASH not enabled by default). Feedback is more than 
welcome.

Cheers,
Jared