PXE boot and no kernel/init messages

[Peter Schmiedeskamp]

Hello, I'm writing in hopes that someone will
recognize the problem I'm seeing and point me in the
right direction.

I'm currently working on setting up a network booting
environment similar to what is described in The
Network People, Inc.'s "FreeBSD 5 PXE boot recipe"
(http://www.tnpi.biz/computing/freebsd/pxe-netboot.shtml).
 I'm deviating from the instructions in that I'm
pulling my mfsroot image from the server via TFTP
rather than NFS.  Here's a brief description of what
I'm attempting to do:

1. PXE environment loads a TFTP enabled "pxeboot"  
--- works
2. Fetch kernel from TFTP  --- works
3. Fetch custom MFSROOT via TFTP  --- works
4. Boot --- have encountered problems here, but also
see limited success (see below).

Step 4 is where I seem to have problems.  If I use an
uncompressed mfsroot.gz file that I extract from
FreeBSD's mfsroot.flp, I can boot and I eventually see
the familiar installation screen.  However, no output
is written to the screen between the time the kernel
loads and the time sysinstall appears on the screen. 
I suspect the console is only being initialized as a
function of the (curses?) library that sysinstall
uses?

When I use a custom mfsroot (I don't actually intend
to run sysinstall at all), I don't see any status
messages written to the screen despite the fact that
my mfsroot is pulled across the wire properly and that
the kernel appears to have loaded.  Also, I can boot
using kern.flp and my custom mfsroot and I see both
kernel and init messages posted to the screen.  But
nothing when I boot the same kernel/mfsroot over PXE.

Is there some way that I must initialize the console
to see the normal boot messages?

Thank you in advance.

-Peter


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