PCengines ALIX boot0sio serial input failes

[Milan Obuch]

On Wednesday 09 December 2009 17:13:57 Daniel Braniss wrote:
> hi,
> 	FreeBSD-8 works great on these boards, but there are some
> gotchas, the boot and the serial: output works fine, but input
> is 'problematic'. the pxeboot serial handling is ok, the boot menu
> is ok, but booting off the CF (using boot0sio), the input 'screwy'
> at the selection of partition it is ignored, at the OK: prompt
> from the boot (i had no kernel in the slice), the input is usually
> doubled:
> 	sshooww instead of show
> which is probably similar to what is happening with boot0sio but it
> only echoes # (the current bell).
>
> Once the kernel is up, the serial works fine.
>
> any ideas?
>

Which ALIX board exactly? There are some differences (even various BIOSes).
Any chance you have vga driver in kernel? TinyBIOS emulates VGA a bit, 
redirects output to serial port. If at the beginning you are trying both VGA 
and serial port, output is doubled. Similar behavior is observed on older 
WRAP boards, too.

Milan