[mlang23]

Does anyone know if qemu and OVMF can be made to work in plain text mode? I just tried but qemu wants GTK by default, and when I pass -curses I get a message that the screen is in 640 x 480 graphics mode. Is UEFI really that complex that it doesnt allow for plain console access?

[a7b3fa]

Try '-nographic'. It can be a bit wonky IME, but good enough for the basics.

[toast0]

If you do this (or -serial mon:stdio and leave the VGA output), you can do console I/O via com1, and it works pretty well. As a bonus, this is viable on real hardware too, although most consumer level motherboards don't do serial consoles :(

[mlang23]

Thanks, -nographic did the trick.