[Soekris] 5501 Mystery - to me - at boot time

[Jan Hoevers]

Iustin Pop wrote on 8-10-2007 8:19:
> On Mon, Oct 08, 2007 at 08:10:52AM +0200, Bent wrote:
>> Hi Balazs
>>
>> 2007/10/7, Balazs Nagy <bnagy at thenewpush.com>:
>>> You need to have the serial speed the same in bios, boot loader and kernel.
>>>
>> It is: 19200 b/sec. To be truthful, however, I cannot see why this
>> could explain the phenomena . It should not care whether anything
>> legible comes over the serial interface when booting, since it
>> supposedly runs unattended.
> 
>>From your description, it could sound like the serial port is setup in
> some sort of flow-control mode, that block output until some terminal
> it's connected to it.
> 
> However, that sounds really strange, I've never seen grub setting up the
> port like that.
> 
> Maybe the problem is something else... I'm normally running using
> hiddenmenu - maybe try using that as displaying the menu requires a
> terminal? Or use --dumb?
> 
> regards,
> iustin

Years ago I had a baudrate problem, and I found out that the uart 
involved had a "framing error" pin. It came on when data arrived at 
wrong speed and confused the software.

It was on different hardware and grub was not involved, but maybe it's 
the explanation.

Jan