> When I use the console terminal on the SPARC, I never pass a special
> kernel parameter. All you need to do is remove the framebuffer, don't
> attach and keyboard, then plug in a serial terminal to serial port A.
> I've never done this with a real terminal, but with a null modem and
> kermit. Either way, once the Sun sees it doesn't have a framebuffer or
> keyboard, it'll dump everything out on the serial port.
It's already doing that just due to the keyboard not being present.
I already get everything via the serial port. Even the Linux kernel
probing messages come out via the serial port. And once /dev/console
was in the initrd /dev tree, init's messages came out via serial.
The problem is, because the keyboard was not present, the PROM disabled
the video card. The Linux kernel, not getting an enabled video card,
didn't initialize the video console driver. Thus, there was no active
driver for the virtual consoles /dev/tty1 thru /dev/tty64. Attempting
to open them gets an error, even those the node file is there, just like
you'd get an error opening /dev/hda9 when there are only partitions 1-4
or opening /dev/sda when there are no SCSI devices.
Something wanted to open tty4. I think that was syslog. But something
else may be doing that, too. If we can make that stop, then serial port
console would work. Then I'd get 3 messages about inittab ids 1-3 doing
a respawn every 5 minutes.
I think the following my work. A program run as /linuxrc before init
even starts would test tty1 through tty4. If they fail, it would make
some changes, like switch inittab to inittab.serial which is specially
configured for serial, and similarly for syslogd.conf. Then it would
exit and let the normal initialization proceed.
-- | Phil Howard - KA9WGN | My current websites: linuxhomepage.com, ham.org | phil (at) ipal.net +---------------------------------------------------- | Dallas - Texas - USA | phil-evaluates-email-ads-750-dollars-each@ipal.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 19 2002 - 11:00:02 PDT