From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Apr 12 23:08:26 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 15D911065670 for ; Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:26 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jdc@koitsu.dyndns.org) Received: from qmta03.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net (qmta03.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net [76.96.62.32]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B48BE8FC12 for ; Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:25 +0000 (UTC) Received: from omta15.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net ([76.96.62.87]) by qmta03.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast id WmWj1g0021swQuc53n8RYc; Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:25 +0000 Received: from koitsu.dyndns.org ([67.180.84.87]) by omta15.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net with comcast id Wn8Q1g00Z1t3BNj3bn8Qbr; Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:25 +0000 Received: by icarus.home.lan (Postfix, from userid 1000) id C96069B422; Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:08:22 -0700 (PDT) Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 16:08:22 -0700 From: Jeremy Chadwick To: Pawel Tyll Message-ID: <20110412230822.GA33610@icarus.home.lan> References: <4DA4A96F.9000507@frasunek.com> <20110412204955.GA31582@icarus.home.lan> <1474571124.20110412231306@nitronet.pl> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1474571124.20110412231306@nitronet.pl> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, Przemyslaw Frasunek Subject: Re: Missing serial port after enabling serial console in loader.conf X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 23:08:26 -0000 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 |