On Wednesday 30 August 2006 13:00, Marian Hettwer wrote: > Hi All, > > I'm trying to pxeboot a Dell 1650 with OpenBSD 3.9. Console redirection > of the BIOS is running without problems and pxeboot gets transmitted via > tftp too. > When I type in "set tty com0", I get the following message: > com0 console not present > And of course when I say "boot bsd.rd", bsd.rd is fetched via tftp but I > have no output. > > That's kinda strange, because the BIOS is already redirected to the > serial port and on the very same box I can install Debian Linux > remotely, console always working flawlessly, from BIOS to Lilo and > system itself. > Don't have a Dell 1650 specifically, but most pre-boot "console redirection" I've seen on PCs is basically screen-scraping the VGA text buffer. When you are running Debian linux, is login via a getty on [linux] ttyS0 once that system has booted, or is the system perhaps still actually screen-scraping VGA text, so logging in on the serial port is actually via a getty on [linux] tty1 ? Actually, I suspect the latter, because usually you have to edit the inittab post-install to enable a getty on ttyS0...
On our PC systems with redirection, there is a BIOS setting for when the redirection cuts out, something like: always pre-boot shared disabled "always" is just wrong if you intend to cut over to direct driving of the serial port at some stage, as you are trying to do with OpenBSD by the looks of it... The fact that openbsd boot isn't seeing the com port at all suggests to me that maybe you've got the equivalent of "always" on, and the BIOS is hiding the com port. "pre-boot" is fine if your bootloader has "native" serial output support that can be set as a default (otherwise you might not get a chance to tell it to go to serial mode), or you don't feel the need to interact with bootup and can wait until the OS brings up a getty on the serial port. "shared" works for most bootloaders, so long as they stay in text mode (in fact, sometimes more reliably than native serial port support of the bootloader): screen scraping persists until user code eventually accesses com0, then screen scraping cuts out and it becomes a serial port. Opportunity for line-noise-spewing screwup if your console redirection BIOS serial port settings and first serial port access aren't both at the same serial comms settings...
