IPMI serial console

[Daniel O'Connor]

On 22/02/2013, at 9:59, Jeremy Chadwick <jdc at koitsu.org> wrote:
> The reason I've advocated use of -Sxxx in /boot.config for years is
> because it gets around whatever idiocy there is in the FreeBSD kernel
> pertaining to serial port speed limitation.  Possibly those boot2
> changes I mentioned above have since dealt with this, but the situation
> used to be that without -Sxxx in /boot.config, you had to set
> BOOT_COMCONSOLE_SPEED=115200 in /etc/make.conf (or during buildworld and
> buildkernel) to achieve a serial port speed >9600bps -- otherwise
> FreeBSD would limit/cap the serial speed to 9600bps and you wouldn't see
> any output (even once getty(8) started -- yet switching the serial
> connection to 9600bps instantly made things work).  Like I said,
> possibly this has been dealt with.

Hmm I tried putting '-S 115200' in /boot.config and it broke - the boot process didn't run the loader (or kernel).

> Sorry for my rambling Email, but there's a lot of history and crap
> contained here (almost 10 years worth) that's hard to cover tersely.

So much cruft :(

> For Daniel: have you tried a verbose boot, to see if you get *anything*
> prior to the initial "Copyright" line?  (Keep a raw I/O dump too, to see
> if ANY characters are received, not just printable ones -- that can
> sometimes help determine if some code is initialising something wrong)

I had a look by running ipmitool inside script but I could not see any characters after the BIOS prints a countdown to boot.

--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
  -- Andrew Tanenbaum
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