Serial console not working in 7.2-p4 and 7.2-STABLE

[Jeremy Chadwick]

On Wed, Nov 11, 2009 at 09:14:05AM +0100, Sven Hazejager wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 18:52, Sven Hazejager <sven at hazejager.nl> wrote:
> > I'm pulling my hair out on this one! Can't get the serial console to
> > work with nanoBSD, either 7.2-p4 or 7-STABLE. A 8.0 nanoBSD image
> > works fine (which I have not created myself). The symptom is that all
> > kernel output goes to VGA. Whatever I do. This happens in VMware
> > Player (where I actually see the VGA output) and on my ALIX
> > (Soekris-like) board (which does not have a VGA card).
> 
> PROBLEM SOLVED!
> 
> In an attempt to minimize FreeBSD for nanoBSD I had WITHOUT_FORTH=true
> in my /etc/src.conf. That apparently breaks the passing of boot flags
> to the kernel, which causes the kernel to use the VGA output even
> though boot.config has "-h" and console=comconsole in the loader.

This would actually break a large portion of the FreeBSD bootstraps.

I'd advocate that WITHOUT_FORTH be removed until the bootstraps are
upgraded to something that doesn't rely on forth (if/when that ever
happens).  Otherwise, someone may want modify the framework involving
src.conf to state that if WITHOUT_FORTH is defined, to bail on a build.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |