Blade 100 w/ 5.4-PRERELEASE console

[Marius Strobl]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 12:22:14AM -0600, Will Andrews wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> David O'Brien asked me to email you about this issue.  I have a
> Sun Blade 100 running FreeBSD since 5.0.  Recently, it appears
> that a change was made to uart(4) which causes the console to
> break.  With older RELENG_5 kernels (specifically, mine from
> November 2004 and the Feb_2005 SNAP001 version), the kernel sends
> messages to ttya (serial console).  However, with the recent
> versions, you have to set {output,input}-device to "ttya" in the
> OpenBoot PROM, to get the kernel messages.  I believe the system
> will still boot.  But apparently with Solaris (and older FreeBSD)
> the kernel sent messages to the serial console without needing to

This should be fixed in sys/dev/uart/uart_cpu_sparc64.c rev. 1.18.
Could you please update and verify that you now get a serial console
on the Blade 100 with uart(4) when input-device=keyboard and
output-device=screen but no keyboard is plugged in?

> mess with the OBP variables.  I believe this is needless pain for
> users trying to install FreeBSD on their Blade 100s (and possibly
> other models).

No, this is a nit which easily can be worked around. A real pain is
that binutils are broken on sparc64 and users have to manually apply
a patch to the base src and recompile binutils in order to be able
to build a number of ports.

Marius