NVIDIA does not work with framebuffer drivers

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

The graphical splash screen is disabled on NVIDIA's proprietry drivers, since they won't work properly with framebuffers and will cause instability. I believe this will all be fixed as part of their wayland support which will include a KMS layer, but that is a ways off and certainly won't be in for 15.10.

The latest NVIDIA drivers now support KMS, so in theory plymouth can be made to work on them now. however none of this is likely to happen for the initial 16.04 release

Still giving trouble:

As of 2018-01-31, from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS updated today.
Graphics board: GeForce GT 640/PCIe/SSE2

[ 0.684928] fb0: EFI VGA frame buffer device
...
[ 0.809004] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[ 0.809006] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
[ 0.812251] nvidia: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
[ 0.815777] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 247
[ 0.815961] vgaarb: device changed decodes: PCI:0000:01:00.0,olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=io+mem
[ 0.816010] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 384.111 Tue Dec 19 23:51:45 PST 2017 (using threaded interrupts)
[ 0.816736] scsi host0: ahci
[ 0.816797] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms 384.111 Tue Dec 19
...

[ 21.508049] NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console
               on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver
               requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console
               drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in
               corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.

That message is also placed in /proc/driver/nvidia/warnings/fbdev

/proc/driver/nvidia/gpus/0000:01:00.0/information:

Model: GeForce GT 640
IRQ: 29
GPU UUID: GPU-fac5d87e-4fff-7179-bbf6-e1f4348104e5
Video BIOS: 80.07.26.00.40
Bus Type: PCIe
DMA Size: 40 bits
DMA Mask: 0xffffffffff
Bus Location: 0000:01:00.0
Device Minor: 0

So, after all these years, NVidia boards are still not playing well with Ubuntu.