ITS THE MEMORY MAP. gfx_is_active sits at 0xA12C0 which is past 0xA0000 aka inside the VGA framebuffer window. reads from there always return 0xFF in text mode, writes vanish into the void. the kernel bss grew past 640k and parked a variable in video memory. the “graphics thunk situation” was never the thunk. it was never even the graphics. one line in the linker script moves bss to 1MiB and everything works. i want to scream (affectionate). theres some more to be done before its usable in practice (because it never really was i guess) but SOON.