PCengines ALIX boot0sio serial input failes

[Jim Pingle]

On 12/9/2009 11:13 AM, 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.

The development version of pfSense (2.0) is running on FreeBSD 8.0 using
NanoBSD and its serial input/output works pretty well on ALIX, the
2d3.2d13 version at least (and others, but those are the only two I have
used personally).

My test ALIX is at home unplugged at the moment, but based on what I see
in the image file there are a few things that were done:

/boot/device.hints contains:
hint.uart.0.at="isa"
hint.uart.0.port="0x3F8"
hint.uart.0.flags="0x10"
hint.uart.0.irq="4"

/boot.config contains:
 -h

The initial boot0cfg on an image is done with:
boot0cfg -B -b /path/to/boot/boot0sio -o packet -s 1 -m 3 <device>

Here is what shows up when I mount an md device from a CF image:
# boot0cfg -v /dev/md0
#   flag     start chs   type       end chs       offset         size
1   0x80      0:  1: 1   0xa5    444: 15:63           63       448497
2   0x00    445:  1: 1   0xa5    889: 15:63       448623       448497
3   0x00    890:  0: 1   0xa5    991: 15:63       897120       102816

version=2.0  drive=0x80  mask=0x3  ticks=182  bell=# (0x23)
options=packet,update,nosetdrv
volume serial ID 9090-9090
default_selection=F1 (Slice 1)

Seems to work pretty well there. If you want the details, you can check
out the pfSense tools git repository which contains the build scripts
that generate the images.

Jim