Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 72957
Editing boot args is buggy when using serial console setup
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:03 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1 Description of problem: When GRUB is configured to use a serial console, booting via a normal VGA console and trying to edit the boot arguments with 'e' causes corrupt line editing. It appears that the command line editing has some bugs in this scenario. For example, on long boot arguments, it sometimes does not accept any input or overwrites what you type with what is the default. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add following lines to /etc/grub.conf: serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 terminal --timeout=10 --dumb serial console Also comment out splash screen: #splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz 2. Setup some kernel arguments for booting serial, i.e.: title Red Hat Linux (2.4.18-5) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.18-5 ro root=/dev/sda1 console=tty0 console=ttyS0 initrd /boot/initrd-2.4.18-5.img 2. Reboot, press any key at normal console (not serial) when grub prompts for it. 3. Press 'e', select the kernel line, then 'e' again. This drops to command line editor which becomes corrupt when typing. Actual Results: Text that is typed in is sometimes completely ignored or overwritten with current boot arguments. Expected Results: Command line editor should provide text editing correctly. Additional info:
You'll probably have better luck without the --dumb on the terminal line. That causes it to just do dumb terminal emulation which isn't going to let you do everything that the default vt100 emulation allows. Do things work better then?
Yes, taking out --dumb seems to fix the problem. Thanks.