PCengines ALIX boot0sio serial input failes

[Jim Pingle]

On 12/10/2009 2:32 AM, Daniel Braniss wrote:
>> 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.

A lot of users have seen that happen, but typically it has been cleared
up by using ALIX BIOS v0.99h, which that box already appears to have,
and setting the BIOS for CHS mode.

I haven't tried any of the ALIX models with VGA, but I have heard they
are working as long as you set the BIOS for APM power management. (See
the previous -STABLE thread titled "8.0-rc2 dropped hardsupport".

Jim