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Apologies for the terseness of this BZ. I installed F16 through kickstart, specifying serial console. The install succeeded, and when the system rebooted, I got the appropriate kernel boot messages which were readable on the serial console. However, as soon as plymouth started, the serial console output turned into garbage. I poked at it a bit and discovered that stty was reporting the console speed set to 57600 despite all my efforts to set it to 115200. Disabling plymouth by removing /lib/systemd/system/plymouth* caused the problem to go away and my login prompt to appear.
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I don't have time today to see if this still exists on rawhide, so I'm assuming so to keep it open and I'll try to verify that later in the week and close if it's fixed there.
Kickstarted serial console is working nicely on F18, so I'm closing this BZ.