Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:08:22 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick <freebsd@jdc.parodius.com> To: Pawel Tyll <ptyll@nitronet.pl> Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Przemyslaw Frasunek <przemyslaw@frasunek.com> Subject: Re: Missing serial port after enabling serial console in loader.conf Message-ID: <20110412230822.GA33610@icarus.home.lan> In-Reply-To: <1474571124.20110412231306@nitronet.pl> References: <4DA4A96F.9000507@frasunek.com> <20110412204955.GA31582@icarus.home.lan> <BANLkTimUk7LLhqOK7z3h5wpQCyMz-VwwFA@mail.gmail.com> <1474571124.20110412231306@nitronet.pl>
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On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 11:13:06PM +0200, Pawel Tyll wrote: > >> P.S. -- What's "BMC" stand for? > > Baseband Management Controller. It's the separate NIC (sometimes it's > > piggy-backed on a NIC) used for remote management of motherboards. > > Usually includes IPMI support. Depending on the motherboard, it may > > even include support for keyboard/video/mouse redirection and > > serial-over-lan and all that other remote management stuff. > > Actually, the board in reference has built-in BMC; it's IPMI managed > and when properly configured it allows user to ssh to its IP and > access things like SOL, chassis power control and other IPMI things > without any IPMI clients. As to video redirection, there's addon for > that, built-in BMC doesn't have anything that fancy. And on point, I > was having similar problems with these boards some time ago, but it > seems it has been fixed somewhere between 8.1 and 8.2. If I remember correctly from following commits, there were changes to the boot loader pertaining to serial port initialisation. I think I remember something about certain control bits being set/reset when they should have been masked out (left alone). As I understand it, the serial console capabilities on FreeBSD are tested predominantly with motherboards that have on-board serial ports. That is to say, systems with classic/legacy DB9 ports on the board itself and not via IPMI or out-of-band management modules (re: BMC). So, one should not be too surprised that there may be "oddities" seen with those. I imagine that UART enumeration/initialisation might differ on such modules, so this sort of problem doesn't surprise me much. Marcel Moolenaar (author of uart(4)) probably has better insights. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc@parodius.com | | Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ | | UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP 4BD6C0CB |
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