freebsd-questions Digest, Vol 68, Issue 29

[J. Seth Henry]

Robert,
I have a FreeBSD based router running on an Intel PIII board (D815EFV) that 
uses a serial console. I redirect to com1/cuaa0 at 115 kbps. I also 
configured FreeBSD to use a serial console as the primary console, and I 
haven't had any problems with the router failing to boot, either with or 
without a terminal attached. Finally, I set up a getty session, so I can 
login via cuaa0. The only messages I miss are the fdisk/startup messages.

Sorry I can't help, but I would suspect a configuration issue.

-Seth Henry


On Tuesday, July 13, 2004 12:35, freebsd-questions-request at freebsd.org wrote:
> Message: 30
> Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 12:05:14 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>
> Subject: BIOS console redirection *and* serial console with FreeBSD
> To: questions at FreeBSD.org
> Message-ID:
>         <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1040713120023.66891A-100000 at fledge.watson.org>
> Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
>
>
> I have access to several boxes that support "BIOS console redirection", in
> which access to the BIOS and BIOS-based console I/O is redirected to a
> serial port.  This is pretty neat functionality, as it allows me to
> reconfigure RAID arrays, change a variety of system settings, boot
> preferences, etc, via the serial console.
>
> However, I run into a problem when I attempt to use BIOS redirection with
> FreeBSD's native serial console support.  If I just configure a login
> session on ttyd0, it pops up once the boot completes and appears perfectly
> workable.  However, if I turn on 'console="comconsole"' in loader.conf,
> the system will appear to hang or otherwise wedge rather than boot.
> Currently, the boxes where I've experienced this are all remote, so I
> can't report on what actually appears on the console -- however, the
> systems appear to never boot.
>
> My ideal world order would have a natural transition from BIOS console
> redirection to FreeBSD's serial console, letting me configure BIOS/RAID
> settings, configure loader pieces (swap kernels, set tunables, etc), then
> onto the kernel serial console pieces, and finally launching a login
> session on ttyd0.
>
> Does anyone have experience with making this actually happen, or similar
> experience with it not working?  I'm seeing it right now on a recent Xeon
> Intel-based motherboard ("Westville"), but also on an older Intel
> ServerWorkers PIII motherboard.  Is the FreeBSD loader serial code doing
> something un-kosher that the BIOS redirection implementation doesn't like?
> Can we make it behave better?  Or is the BIOS redirection implementation
> just broken when it comes to dealing with use of the serial port by the
> OS?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
> robert at fledge.watson.org      Principal Research Scientist, McAfee Research