nixos/console: console font overriden by later boot process

[sempiternal-aurora]

Nixpkgs version

• Unstable (25.11)

Describe the bug

On boot, the tty quickly changes from the compiled in kernel font to the separately specified font I have set in console.font, along with console.packages and more. However, later in the build process with quiet and splash disabled, the screen clears of all kernel messages, and the font resets to a different one that I have no idea where it comes from. This persists into the Display Manager, and other tty shells, and using setfont in the tty changes the font to the one I expect, and it is clearly a different font.

Is there any reason this would be happening? Or any other config option I should look into that will be causing this.

Steps to reproduce

My console config is as follows:

console = {
  earlySetup = true;
  font = "${pkgs.terminus_font}/share/consolefonts/ter-i28b.psf.gz";
  packages = [ pkgs.terminus_font ];
  keymap = "us";
};

This happens on both the zen and default kernel, and it also works without the early setup option. Simply reboot into a system with this config without the quiet and splash flags passed to the kernel and note the change in the logs as this happens.

Expected behaviour

The console font config should not be overriden, and all tty's and tui display managers should respect the font choice

Screenshots

No response

Relevant log output

Additional context

I can't seem to find anything anywhere in the logs about the console or font that seems relevant.

System metadata

• system: "x86_64-linux"
• host os: Linux 6.14.7-zen1, NixOS, 25.11 (Xantusia), 25.11.20250601.0d0bc64
• multi-user?: yes
• sandbox: yes
• version: nix-env (Nix) 2.28.3
• channels(root): "nixos-24.05"
• nixpkgs: /nix/store/nfhd4av80pvzyikkpym3x1x2gk304fym-source

Notify maintainers

@9ary @K900 I can't find a meta.maintainers, but you two seem to be the most recent who worked on this module.

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[9ary]

This sounds a lot like #202846. This is a kernel issue and there is very little we can do about it from userspace.