Dear Maintainer,

Previously I was running Debian bookworm, where GRUB was working fine.
But after a clean install of trixie, GRUB shows only a blank menu screen
on both of my computers. After uncommenting the GRUB_TERMINAL line in
/etc/default/grub it was working again, just a bit uglier.

As the graphics mode was working with GRUB v2.06-13 I made some
investigations:

I am using these two machines, both quite old:
- Dell Inspiron 17R Special Edition (7720) from 2013
- Apple iMac12,1 from 2011

When using GRUB in terminal mode, videoinfo looks normal:

grub> videoinfo
List of supported video modes:
Legend: mask/position=red/green/blue/reserved
Adapter `Bochs PCI Video Driver´:
  No info available
Adapter `Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI Video Driver´:
  No info available
Adapter `EFI GOP driver´:
  0x000 1280 x 1024 x 32 (5120)  Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8  pos: 16/8/0/24
  0x001 1024 x  768 x 32 (4096)  Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8  pos: 16/8/0/24
  0x002  640 x  480 x 32 (2560)  Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8  pos: 16/8/0/24
  0x003  800 x  600 x 32 (3200)  Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8  pos: 16/8/0/24
  0x004 1920 x 1080 x 32 (7680)  Direct color, mask: 8/8/8/8  pos: 16/8/0/24
grub>

But videotest will all video modes gives only a blank screen.

Then I tried GRUB_VIDEO_BACKEND=efi_gop in /etc/default/grub,
but that doesn't change anything.

But at one test I misspelled the video backend. This resulted in a
brief display on an error message, but then the graphical mode was
working. More tests showed that sending some text at the beginning
of /boot/grub/grub.cfg was also successful on both machines.
Even an 'echo -n ""' is fine.

So I created a tiny /etc/grub.d/000_early_init:
---
#! /bin/sh
set -e

# Initialize graphics display
echo 'echo -n ""'
---

After update-grub I got a working graphical menu on GRUB.


Best regards
Bernhard