running freebsd in qemu using the "-nographic" option ?

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Mar 23), Aziz KEZZOU said:
> I am running freebsd 5.3 under qemu (a fast IA32 emulator). My host
> system is linux. Everything works fine, but I want to get rid of this
> small non-scrollable window, not practical when gcc says I made many
> many errors :-)...

In FreeBSD, you can scroll vtys by hitting scroll-lock, then using the
up/down/pgup/pgdn/home/end keys to view the scrollback.  Hit
scroll-lock again to go exit scrollback mode.

You could also use screen or pipe your output to less.
 
> Instead I want to get a console. In qemu's  documentation it says :
> ======================================================================
> `-nographic'
>     Normally, QEMU uses SDL to display the VGA output. With this
> option, you can totally disable graphical output so that QEMU is a
> simple command line application. The emulated serial port is
> redirected on the console. Therefore, you can still use QEMU to debug
> a Linux kernel with a serial console.
> ======================================================================
> 
> So basically what I need is, some how, to tell the freebsd kernel to
> forward its output/input to a serial port. In linux this is done by
> supplying the parameter "console=ttyS0". Is there something
> equivalent in FreeBSD ?

To boot using a serial console, add this to /boot/loader.conf:

console="comconsole"
 
To enable a login prompt on the serial port after the system has come
up, edit /etc/ttys and change the ttyd0 line from "off" to "on".

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com