[OpenIndiana-discuss] Serial console for OI/Solaris on Intel MFSYS blades

[Gary Mills]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 06:53:23PM +0400, Jim Klimov wrote:
> 
>   I have a peculiar problem: the Intel MFSYS blade servers, in short ;)
> 
>   The problem is, the redirected console gets lost after Solaris 10
> or OI boots on the blade. It works somewhat for BIOS and GRUB (but
> even there it sometimes loses connections or farts out invalid
> characters), and if I boot with "-B console=ttya" - sercon usually
> makes it through the OS build version banner and prints a character
> or two of the OS initialization (console logs from SMF startups).

You will always get output for BIOS and GRUB because these do their
I/O through the BIOS, using BIOS redirection.  Once Linux or Solaris
start, they do their own I/O directly to the serial port.

How many `asy' ports show up in `prtconf -v'?  It's usually COM3
(ttyc) that's used for serial-over-lan.  You'll likely need to use
`console=ttyc' in the GRUB menu.  Try also these settings in
/boot/solaris/bootenv.rc:

    setprop ttyc-rts-dtr-off false
    setprop ttyc-ignore-cd true
    setprop ttyc-mode 9600,8,n,1,-
    setprop console ttyc

You might also have to set the serial bit rate to match in the
firmware on the remote management card.  You can also change it in
OI to match the card's.

-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-