Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
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On 10/23/2011 03:34 PM, Bill Davidsen wrote:
I have a friend who is running his business on an old OpenServer machine, and would love to be able to just run a copy in a VM. The issue is that it talks to the old serial terminals through a multiport card. Any hope that I could get KVM to provide usable serial ports to the VM using a modern card? Or even not so new, I have a case of unused "HUB6" cards and would be glad to find a home for one, since modem pools are not a big thing anymore.
I last did SCO admin for a living in 1993, and have done little but Linux since, so I'm not right on top of this OS any more :-(
I have not tried it, so this is just an idea. If Linux supports the multi-port card, and it does support some, then map that many serial ports from the VM to the actual ports. You will have to check if your VM has enough virtual ports to make it work.
Progress - I have the physical disk image in a file, and I start it with qemu-kvm and it comes up to the "boot:" prompt. At that point things I type are echoed to the console. If I hit ENTER the next part of the boot continues, and it gets to the prompt "Enter control-d for normal boot or root password for maintenance" At that point it ignores the keyboard, and if I go into QEMU and try to send the character with that, "sendkey cntl-d" it ignores that as well. This was in a *very* old system and I bet it's looking for an AT keyboard rather than PS/2. Any thoughts?
I can take it to the KVM list, but there is a tendency to suggest going to the latest version of KVM before really looking at the problem. I can't do that, this is a production KVM host, and I can't really risk an upgrade.