FreeBSD Console Problems

[Crist J. Clark-3]

I've got a new net5501. For now, I'm just trying to do a diskless
boot with FreeBSD. The first few stages of the netboot appear to
be working fine. It gets a DCHP lease. It fetches the pxeboot
via TFTP, but having some problems after this.

It looks like the boot is continuing, but it is not completing,
and I'm not sure what's going on because the console is not
readable. All of the output is on the same line and it looks
like it keeps getting overwritten with blanks. I see a brief
flash of a few charcaters, then gone. What I mostly see is the
spinner, "/-\|/", spinning away on the line.

This sounds like the cons25 problem I see mentioned in many
sources about running FreeBSD on Soekris, but I did comment out,

  # Include simple terminal emulation (cons25-compatible)
  #CFLAGS+= -DTERM_EMU

In /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/Makefile. And then did a,

  # cd /usr/src/sys/boot
  # make obj && make depend && make && make install

(In a jail with with the root that the net5501 is trying to
mount as root.) But I still seem to have the problem. Am I
missing some other step? Is this not the terminal emulation
problem?

And once I get this fixed, I think at some point later in the
boot the console appears to flip to a different speed. I get
garbage characters. Perhaps when the kernel takes over from
the loader, it's falling back to 9600?
--
Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark@...
_______________________________________________
Soekris-tech mailing list
Soekris-tech@...
http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech

[Mark Hartley]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 09:00:02PM -0700, Crist J. Clark wrote:

> I've got a new net5501. For now, I'm just trying to do a diskless
> boot with FreeBSD. The first few stages of the netboot appear to
> be working fine. It gets a DCHP lease. It fetches the pxeboot
> via TFTP, but having some problems after this.
>
> It looks like the boot is continuing, but it is not completing,
> and I'm not sure what's going on because the console is not
> readable. All of the output is on the same line and it looks
> like it keeps getting overwritten with blanks. I see a brief
> flash of a few charcaters, then gone. What I mostly see is the
> spinner, "/-\|/", spinning away on the line.
>
> This sounds like the cons25 problem I see mentioned in many
> sources about running FreeBSD on Soekris, but I did comment out,
>
>   # Include simple terminal emulation (cons25-compatible)
>   #CFLAGS+= -DTERM_EMU
>
> In /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/Makefile. And then did a,
>
>   # cd /usr/src/sys/boot
>   # make obj && make depend && make && make install
>
> (In a jail with with the root that the net5501 is trying to
> mount as root.) But I still seem to have the problem. Am I
> missing some other step? Is this not the terminal emulation
> problem?
>
> And once I get this fixed, I think at some point later in the
> boot the console appears to flip to a different speed. I get
> garbage characters. Perhaps when the kernel takes over from
> the loader, it's falling back to 9600?
> --
> Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark@...

I am pretty certain that is what happens here.  I have found that
it is simpler to go into the combios of the soekris and just set
it to 9600, since that's what FreeBSD switches to at a certain
point in the boot sequence.

As to your first issue, I will have to leave that to someone
else.  I used the minibsd guide at:
http://www.ultradesic.com/index.php?section=125
as my starting point for getting FreeBSD 6 up and running.  I
have it running on several net4801s and net5501s, though they
are all using Compact Flash cards, not netbooting.


Mark.



_______________________________________________
Soekris-tech mailing list
Soekris-tech@...
http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech