PCengines ALIX boot0sio serial input failes

[Daniel Braniss]

> 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.
i have now, and the results are:
 - serial works
 - bios boot skips boot0, and goes straight to boot slice 1.

The good side is that PXE boot works, but switching to boot
from disk is a pain, on other systems, hitting ^C at the dhcp
will stop it, and the boot will continue from disk, which if fails
(forgot some critical setup :-), reboot, fix, boot ^C ...

> 
> 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.

it's actualy setting Power Management to anything but ACPI.

>                                                                  (See
> the previous -STABLE thread titled "8.0-rc2 dropped hardsupport".
> 
> Jim

cheers,
	danny