[Soekris] GRUB terminal emulation?

[Jordan Share]

Kevin P. Fleming wrote:

> Jordan Share wrote:
> 
>> It's definitely incompatibility between grub and the console 
>> emulation.  If you tell grub to only use serial, then it works as 
>> you'd expect.
> 
> 
> To my eye it appears to be the same problem that PXELINUX has as well; 
> it's almost like comBIOS is trying to use ANSI/VT100 commands to 
> translate the INT10 stuff that the loaders are doing, but the commands 
> are not complete. What I see when GRUB is loading and running almost 
> looks like the commands missing the ESC characters, but I haven't really 
> looked very closely :-)

Ah, yes, I didn't mean to imply that the incompatibility was only 
between grub and the console emulation.  All (well, ok, that's only 
grub, lilo, and pxelinux) the bootloaders that I've tried have wackiness 
with the console emulation such that you are way better off just using 
their built-in serial support.

Alas, with pxelinux, you pretty much have to do per-box config stanzas 
in your dhcpd.conf, so as to either set a specific IP (which would let 
you have a special pxelinux config file for them), or use the 
serial-only pxelinux.0

You could try the newer combios.  I found that it made the pxelinux 
stuff somewhat more legible (but not really enough for use).

> GRUB works fine when told to use the serial port directly; PXELINUX 
> works OK as long as you only need to load the default kernel, or are 
> willing to type in the label you need without much useful feedback 
> (although I will also try the hacked serial-only PXELINUX as well).

The serial-only pxelinux is pretty sweet.  It gets the job done.

Jordan