some notes about converting to custom kernel on KVM on Debian

I'm running Debian 8.2 (Jessie) and I had to do a few things to make the console work well after I converted to a custom kernel. Here are some notes, in case they are useful:

1. Basically, I followed:

https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-refer … l-with-kvm">https://www.linode.com/docs/tools-reference/custom-kernels-distros/run-a-distribution-supplied-kernel-with-kvm

2. Until I added "GRUBTERMINAL=serial" to /etc/default/grub, grub did not come up. The system booted, but without any visibility in the LISH console until the login prompt came up. Setting GRUBTERMINAL made grub visible.

3. By default, my grub settings had GRUBCMDLINELINUX_DEFAULT="quiet". This meant I couldn't see any bootup messages. Removing the "quiet" was helpful.

4. Up until this point, grub would always have an error and pause for several seconds before booting:

error: symbol `grub_video_fb_get_region' not found.
Loading Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 ... 
Loading initial ramdisk ... 

Press any key to continue...

Installing grub to the root block device and switching Linode's boot settings to "Direct Disk" helped. Grub gave the expected error about blocklists being unreliable, though, so I created a new block device with a partition table and migrated over to it.

After that, so far so good.