Date: Sun, 20 Jul 1997 12:29:54 -0400 From: Drew Derbyshire <ahd@kew.com> To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: bde@zeta.org.au Subject: Re: current-digest V3 #104 Message-ID: <33D23D02.80@kew.com> References: <199707192051.NAA11743@hub.freebsd.org>
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> From: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au> > Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 19:06:24 +1000 > Subject: Re: Serial console in -current > > >Understood. How would you propose to handle the case where none of the > >serial devices are marked as console but RB_SERIAL is set? The > >current behaviour is undeniably bogus, not to mention annoying. 8) > Same as if there are no serial devices configured - tell the user to > not use a silly configuration :-). While this may be desirable from purist point of view, I must disagree it for pragmatic reasons. First, the historical behavior not requiring a special flag is reasonable, understood, and consistent with other headless configurations. (At least my SPARC did the Right Thing and found the first serial port when I tried this a year or so ago.) Second, and more importantly, if I have a urgent need to switch to a serial console and I don't have time to regen or extensively reconfigure the kernel, I don't want to be blocked by the kernel refusing to use a reasonable default. (One of my systems doesn't have a normally have monitor -- blindly feeding a boot -h is doable, a kernel reconfig is _not_.) Certainly, allowing the flag to make the behavior tunable is a good thing, but don't break things given how important a console can be to fixing a system which has other boot problems. -ahd-
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