Serial speed for boot device selection prompt

[Larry Baird]

In article <107924.235636.88011 at localhost> you wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 10:50:21AM -0700, Sean Bruno wrote:
>> I have a drive that contains two seperate bootable partitions(ad0s1a and 
>> ad0s2a).  The boot device selection menu(boot0?) appears to only be able to 
>> support 9600 8N1.  I wanted to run the serial console at 115200, but I 
>> currently have to switch to 9600 if I need to change the boot device.  Is 
>> there a way around this that I can't see?  Could I get around this with a 
>> BIOS that can do console redirection?
> 
> Which "boot device selection menu" are you referring to?  "boot0?"
> implies you don't know.  Here's the difference:
> 
> boot0 is this stage:
> 
> F1  FreeBSD
> F5  Drive 1
> Default: F1
> 
> boot2 is this stage:
> 
>>> FreeBSD/i386 BOOT
> Default: 0:ad(0,a)/boot/loader
> boot:
> 
> If you want serial capability in boot0, you should set
> BOOT_COMCONSOLE_SPEED=115200 in your make.conf.  After you do that,
> you'll need to rebuild the boot blocks.  The procedure for doing that is
> step 4 of Section 24.6.5.2 in the Handbook:
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/serialconsole-setup.html

The BIOS call that boot.S is using (int 0x14) only supports a maximum
speed of 9600.  To get speeds greater that 9600, it needs to do the
I/O itself.  There used to be a version floating around that did this.
I have a extemely modified version that uses this method.  If you can't
find a version that does this, let mw know and I'll see if I can cleanup
what I have.

Larry

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Larry Baird                        | http://www.gta.com
Global Technology Associates, Inc. | Orlando, FL
Email: lab at gta.com                 | TEL 407-380-0220, FAX 407-380-6080