PCengines ALIX boot0sio serial input failes

[Daniel Braniss]

> 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.

I have tried ALIX-1 and 2
here is an example:

	PC Engines ALIX.3 v0.99h
	640 KB Base Memory
	261120 KB Extended Memory
	Waiting for HDD ...

	01F0 Master 848A SanDisk SDCFH2-002G                     
	Phys C/H/S 3970/16/63 Log C/H/S 992/64/63

	1  FreeBSD
	2  FreeBSD
	3  FreeBSD

	6 PXE
	Boot:  1 

any key I hit, it echoes as # and is ignored.
at this point the kernel is not yet involved, so having vga+kb support
is not the reason, though I will try out the alix-3, which has vga support, and
a different BIOS soon.

thanks,
	danny