[OpenIndiana-discuss] Setup serial console on ttyc (the third serial port)

[wessels]

Thank you very much for looking it up. Yes grub works on com3. The
problem is that the com port used for serial-over-lan redirection by
the BMC cannot be changed. You can only change it to the physical
ports on the rear but than you loose the SOL capability. So I do need
ttyc.
What a mess. I've no choice but to setup an OpenIndiana build machine.
Download source from behind a firewall and proxy, start a build wait
hours and all for this dumb console. It does strike me odd that I
didn't find more people running into this problem. But if the whole
world was/is using Sun hardware than it's a non issue. I'll keep you
posted. And again many thanks for pointing me to the location I need
to patch, this at least saves some time. If it works a patch to
Illumos would be appropriate I guess.

As always any suggestions are more than welcome


On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 9:50 PM, Andrew Gabriel
<illumos at cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> I suspect it would be very easy to fix this in the kernel.
> I fixed the missing bits in the asy(7D) driver 7 or 8 years ago when I was
> adding 16650/16750 support. I think all that's left to fix is adding ttyc
> and ttyd support to usr/src/uts/i86pc/io/consplat.c
> <url:http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/i86pc/io/consplat.c#107>.
>
> The other bit that was outstanding at that time was the Device Configuration
> Assistant (DCA), which was a complete swine to build. However, that vanished
> in Solaris 10 Update 1, being replaced by grub and some device enumeration
> support in the kernel, and I would guess grub probably does support com3 and
> com4.
>
> wessels wrote:
>>
>> ough, that's a real bummer and waste of time. This restriction is not
>> very well documented. Everybody talked about ttya and ttyb but no ever
>> mentioned that other ports are not supported apart from usb-serial.
>>
>> Now I've to figure out how the ports will get reshuffled if I change
>> the SOL port from com3 to com2. Both com1 and com2 are in use. I
>> wonder what's going to happen to them... If I get this working, that's
>> all three ports, I'll put up a page on the wiki.
>> Thanks for the notice sofar. Anything else I should worry about?
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 7:44 PM, Andrew Gabriel
>> <illumos at cucumber.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>> wessels wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Perhaps all described procedures work on ttya but I can't get a console
>>>> on
>>>> ttyc.
>>>>
>>>> ttyc (the third serial port) is a SerialOverLan port
>>>
>>> Sorry, but the kernel only recognizes ttya and ttyb (and usb-serial) as
>>> console= values, not ttyc.
>>>
>>> It's been a very long missing feature on Solaris x86, but became less
>>> important as the number of motherboard serial ports has reduced over the
>>> years, and ISA-bus serial cards became unusable (no ISA-bus slots
>>> anymore).
>>>
>>> Can you disable ttya (com1) in the BIOS, and then reconfigure ttyc (com3)
>>> to
>>> have the i/o address and irq which were associated with com1, so it looks
>>> like com1 (ttya) to the OS? (IIRC, 0x3f8 and IRQ 4)
>>>
>>> --
>>> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew
>
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