That is normal behaviour. The whole point of vesafb is switching to a
graphic mode while still in real mode (and having access to the card
bios) and then using this mode afterwards. The real-mode bios code
cannot be called (*) from protected-mode, so switching video mode would
require some knowledge of the video card hardware, and if the kernel had
this knowledge, there would be little point in calling bios in the first
place.
vesafb is a neat trick for using extended graphic modes on unsupported
graphic cards, but, due to the non-switching limitation and the non-use
of hardware acceleration, this is a last resort solution.
--Thomas Pornin
(*) FreeBSD can, though. It uses vm86 mode for that; similar things may
be done in Linux, either with some specialized piece of kernel code, or
completely in userland, with something like dosemu.
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