Re: Support for serial console on legacy free machines

Khalid Aziz (khalid@fc.hp.com)
Tue, 31 Jul 2001 10:10:28 -0600


Stuart MacDonald wrote:
>
> It seems like pci consoles won't work, now that I think about it. The
> console driver gets an index, which I'm going to assume works thusly:
> lilo console=ttyS1 ends up passing 1 as the index. That index is used
> to pick a serial port out of the array of serial ports that the driver
> knows about. If console init happens early, and serial driver init happens
> late (it would be dependent on pci init) then only hard coded ports
> would work. Those are defined in asm/serial.h, and for i386 include the
> standard ports, and a number of isa ports from various board manufacturers.
>
> Using one of our pci ports would require knowledge of its io address,
> which wouldn't be available until the pci subsystem had inited. Perhaps
> that could be changed to allow pci based consoles?
>

That is precisely the problem with trying to use a PCI serial port as
console. It is not trivial to move the PCI initialization earlier in the
boot sequence.

-- 
Khalid

==================================================================== Khalid Aziz Linux Systems Operation R&D (970)898-9214 Hewlett-Packard khalid@fc.hp.com Fort Collins, CO - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/