Is this a regression?  Or has this been happening for a while?

This is not necessarily a regression because previous to kevin the recovery kernel used ply-image to display images.  We see this behavior now because we're trying to port the recovery kernel to frecon.

I have seen this behavior in the recovery kernel on samus and kevin and dbehr has seen it with daisy.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon/+/2b9f123b93537f83e1a4f2d192dcab48a8ba658d

commit 2b9f123b93537f83e1a4f2d192dcab48a8ba658d
Author: Dominik Behr <dbehr@chromium.org>
Date: Tue Aug 02 08:11:12 2016

frecon: fix stdio file descriptors

When frecon runs under busybox based initramfs stdio descriptors do not exist
and epoll and other pts fds created by term alias descriptor numbers 0,1,2.
This change adds a function to create stdio file descriptors using /dev/null
for input and /dev/kmsg for output and uses it to fix stdio descriptiors
of they do not exist. It also reuses this function to create stdio descriptors
for daemon mode since current code using garbage from kmsg for stdin doesn't seem
like a good idea.

BUG= chromium:633514 
TEST=run frecon in recovery

Change-Id: I079f106033c3aa71016d728289b80ceeba09db23
Signed-off-by: Dominik Behr <dbehr@chromium.org>
Reviewed-on: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/365261
Commit-Ready: Douglas Anderson <dianders@chromium.org>

[modify] https://crrev.com/2b9f123b93537f83e1a4f2d192dcab48a8ba658d/util.h
[modify] https://crrev.com/2b9f123b93537f83e1a4f2d192dcab48a8ba658d/util.c
[modify] https://crrev.com/2b9f123b93537f83e1a4f2d192dcab48a8ba658d/main.c