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

[Peter Robinson]

Hi Hans,

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

Yes, we're aware of the issue, Dennis is likely the best person to
respond but he's travelling for FUDCon LATAM, he's aware of it and
will reply when he can.

The issue with the initial-setup on the serial vs graphical is a known
issue but it's also one that appears to be hard to fix.

Peter


> 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
>>
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