Bug 13564

Summary:	secondary serial console doesn't work anymore.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Pekka Savola <pekkas>
Component:	lilo	Assignee:	Preston Brown <pbrown>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	high
Version:	7.1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-07-19 14:07:31 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Pekka Savola 2000-07-07 11:57:27 UTC

Lilo doesn't work properly w/ serial console _if_ the serial console is
a secondary console.  Ie:
 ---
 serial=0,38400n8
 append="console=ttyS0,38400 console=tty0"
 ---   

Doesn't work: LILO-prompt won't appear, you won't see the kernel messages
in boot.  

If the positions of console= definitions are reversed, it works _almost_ as
it should.  It doesn't matter whether message= has been defined in
lilo.conf.

Almost: you get only 'LILO' message.  If you hit any key, you get to the
normal lilo prompt alongside with 0x40 error.  After that, everything seems
to work fine.

Downgrading lilo to the one shipped w/ Red Hat 6.2 makes it work again.

Comment 1 Pekka Savola 2000-07-10 15:12:52 UTC

I tested this a bit, with and without special patches.

The big, Stormix-adapted graphical boot menu -patch is causing the problems
here.  I left it out of the RPM, and serial console works fine.

Comment 2 Pekka Savola 2000-07-10 19:45:33 UTC

Preston hacked in lilo-0.21-graphical.patch, assigning to him.

More analysis on this revealed a couple of things:

1) without message=, LILO Prompt appears ok and it accepts user input
---
LILO boot:
Loading linux...........
---

2) After that no kernel messages are shown, either in booting or in shutdown
(stopping md processes).

3) I've had lilo freeze after 'Loading linux...........', killing the boot
process twice now.  The computer had to be resetted; the VGA screen didn't show
anything other than that 'Loading linux...'.  I'm not sure if that's coincidence.

Comment 3 Pekka Savola 2000-07-19 14:07:29 UTC

Anyone interested in testing this, btw, should be able to check it out without
serial console by using:

serial=0,38400n8
append="console=tty0 console=ttyS0,38400"

Now, kernel messages after Loading linux... should be shown on monitor (but aren't)
LILO boot:
Loading linux...........

Comment 4 Pekka Savola 2000-08-01 07:01:50 UTC

Seems to work in beta5.