[fedora-arm] Adding serial console support to extlinux.conf

[Hans de Goede]

Hi All,

ping ?

We really need to come up with some solution for this for F-21 ...

Regards,

Hans


On 10/20/2014 12:29 PM, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I just got a mail from Gerd (in the CC) about some troubles with booting
> an ARM device through a serial console.
> 
> The problem here is that we do not add a console=... to the append argument
> in our extlinux.conf .
> 
> One problem is what the ... must be, that one I've already fixed in the
> v2014.10 u-boot release by adding support for using uboot env variables
> inside the append command in extlinux.conf, so now we can simply append:
> 
> console=${console}
> 
> But this causes 2 problems for devices which also have a graphical console,
> over e.g. hdmi:
> 
> 1) This sends the kernel boot messages to only the serial port, this can
> be easily fixed by instead appending:
> 
> console=tty0 console=${console}
> 
> 2) This will cause first-boot to run on the serial console in text mode,
> instead of on the hdmi output
> 
> 2. is the real deal-breaker here AFAIK. We could fix this by fixing firstboot
> to only go serial if there is no framebuffer or some such, or we could fix
> this by adding a second extlinux.conf menu entry labelled:
> 
> label Fedora-Minimal-armhfp-rawhide-20140731 (...) with serial console
> 
> Ideally we would fix first-boot, but we're probably too late in the cycle
> for that, so I hope we can at least at the extra entry to the extlinux.conf
> on the generated images, if not we will need to document this very clearly,
> and serial console users will need to edit extlinux.conf before booting.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Hans
>