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.
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.
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.
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...........
Seems to work in beta5.