So since all this time I have this ugly vesa resolution, nothing has worked so far, the recent kernel upgrade didn't solve the problem, and there are no updates for the nvidia driver...
However, there's something, I created a new partition and did a fresh stable i386 install then upgrade to unstable, to ensure it was not my old setup which had a specific problem, but it seems not. So on that new install, I still get a black screen. dmesg shows a desperate output: [ 100.314324] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms 361.45.18 Tue Jun 21 17:58:16 PDT 2016 [ 100.315130] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 100.709686] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 101.045590] gnome-shell[1019]: segfault at 24448b2c ip b6118b81 sp bfded03c error 4 in libc-2.24.so[b60a3000+1b1000] [ 101.449901] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 101.823843] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 102.169960] gnome-shell[1074]: segfault at 24448b2c ip b60e2b81 sp bfbd651c error 4 in libc-2.24.so[b606d000+1b1000] [ 102.546999] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 102.936657] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-5e911e77-bb03-4910-7d0a-8201558cf33b) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0 [ 103.259820] gnome-shell[1128]: segfault at 24448b2c ip b614bb81 sp bfcb89dc error 4 in libc-2.24.so[b60d6000+1b1000] And it goes on until I reset the machine. I had a lead though, I tried another fresh stable install then upgrade to unstable, but on amd64 this time, and this time, the nvidia driver worked fine. So it seems to be an architecture problem to solve.
