Re: Support for serial console on legacy free machines

[Andreas Dilger <adilger@turbolinux.com>]

Stuart MacDonald writes:
> From: "Khalid Aziz" <khalid@fc.hp.com>
> > AFAIK, you can not have console on a PCI serial port at this time. I
> > looked at it few months back and found out that PCI initialization
> > happens much too late for a serial console. It would take quite a bit of
> 
> That's very odd. That implies that serial consoles don't use the serial
> driver at all then, as the pci serial port setup is done at the same
> time as the regular serial port setups.
> 
> A) Serial console support is mutually exclusive with the serial driver
> being a module.

Yes, because you want console support long before you get the root fs
mounted and have access to modules.

> C) serial.c contains a completely separate serial console driver,
> complete with its own init routine. Which meshes with the current
> suggestion that the "serial driver" isn't used, and pci init happens
> too late.

It _may_ be that Keith Owens (I think) will change this in 2.5.  He has
talked about a big reorg of the serial layer to separate out the tty
handling from the serial I/O handling.  Maybe at that point my idea of
having a console on a parallel port will work.  I guess that it is just
not that easy right now.

Cheers, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert