[Soekris] FreeBSD 7.0 on a net4801?

[Paul Hoffman]

At 5:56 PM +1100 3/1/08, Graham Menhennitt wrote:
>I had no problem installing a pre-release version of 7.0 a few months ago.

That's good to hear

>Why is the serial output unreadable?

Every character typed by the FreeBSD boot process is erased after 
typing, at least using the console programs I have tried. It has 
always been this way. (I don't build my own kernels.)

>The Soekris BIOS talks at 9600 baud and FreeBSD defaults to 19200 so 
>you might need to change baud rates in mid boot.

No, it's not that. I see each character come up and disappear. As I 
said, I see the countdown happening.

>I also needed to disable DMA as a few recent messages have mentioned.

Yep, did that.

>But it doesn't sound like you're even getting that far. What are you 
>installing from and to?

7.0 RELEASE, from CD onto a CF card on a different machine.

This might be a lot clearer if there was a simple way to get the 
FreeBSD boot stuff to leave its text on the serial console in a way 
that I could see. Am I missing some bit of passed-down wisdom here?