[Soekris] FreeBSD Console Problems

[Mark Hartley]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 09:00:02PM -0700, Crist J. Clark wrote:
> I've got a new net5501. For now, I'm just trying to do a diskless
> boot with FreeBSD. The first few stages of the netboot appear to
> be working fine. It gets a DCHP lease. It fetches the pxeboot
> via TFTP, but having some problems after this.
> 
> It looks like the boot is continuing, but it is not completing,
> and I'm not sure what's going on because the console is not
> readable. All of the output is on the same line and it looks
> like it keeps getting overwritten with blanks. I see a brief
> flash of a few charcaters, then gone. What I mostly see is the
> spinner, "/-\|/", spinning away on the line.
> 
> This sounds like the cons25 problem I see mentioned in many
> sources about running FreeBSD on Soekris, but I did comment out,
> 
>   # Include simple terminal emulation (cons25-compatible)
>   #CFLAGS+= -DTERM_EMU
> 
> In /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/Makefile. And then did a,
> 
>   # cd /usr/src/sys/boot
>   # make obj && make depend && make && make install
> 
> (In a jail with with the root that the net5501 is trying to
> mount as root.) But I still seem to have the problem. Am I
> missing some other step? Is this not the terminal emulation
> problem?
> 
> And once I get this fixed, I think at some point later in the
> boot the console appears to flip to a different speed. I get
> garbage characters. Perhaps when the kernel takes over from
> the loader, it's falling back to 9600?
> -- 
> Crist J. Clark                     |     cjclark at alum.mit.edu

I am pretty certain that is what happens here.  I have found that
it is simpler to go into the combios of the soekris and just set
it to 9600, since that's what FreeBSD switches to at a certain
point in the boot sequence.

As to your first issue, I will have to leave that to someone
else.  I used the minibsd guide at:
http://www.ultradesic.com/index.php?section=125
as my starting point for getting FreeBSD 6 up and running.  I
have it running on several net4801s and net5501s, though they
are all using Compact Flash cards, not netbooting.


Mark.