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Re: How to enable PC-Console on boot



Hello Pierre-Phillip and Manuel,

Am 02.02.2021 um 15:44 schrieb Pierre-Philipp Braun:
 >>> Do you see the Xen boot messages on the screen ?
 >>>
 >>
 >> No, the screen turns black right after the message:
 >>
 >> ```
 >> Loading /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz.../

Matthias there were two implicit components in the question.  XEN boot msg and dom0's kernel boot msg.

 > this means that Xen doesn't know how to deal with the video adapter.
 >
 > I'm not sure Xen fully supports UEFI at this time (at last in Xen 4.13)

Last time I considered it, about one or two years ago, EFI and XEN was still looking like a nightmare.  I would recommend to switch to legacy/CSM/BIOS mode if the machine supports it.  It will make XEN booting much easier.  We can sure help if you want to go in that direction.

This issue of blank booting screen was common and happens on CentOS/RHEL and Debian systems also.  I guess it's indeed because it was sometimes trying to spit on tty0 by default instead of vga.

I notice however that your `console=pc` setting which applies to XEN micro-kernel may be wrong:try console=vga instead *1?

As for dom0's kernel boot msgs, there are surely ways to tune that also specifically for NetBSD *2.  Try to force it over there: maybe `consdev pc`?


*1 https://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable/misc/xen-command-line.html#console

*2 https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-8.0/x86/boot.8
https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-8.0/x86/boot_console.8

Thank you very much for your suggestions. I managed to see the boot message from Xen first with this:

```
menu=Boot Xen:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz root=NAME=root;multiboot /xen.gz dom0_mem=512M console=vga dom0_max_vcpus=1 dom0_vcpus_pin
```

It is displayed very briefly, but is similar in appearance to what I would have expected. Nevertheless, the screen clears afterwards and there is no further output. So the behavior now matches what I read at [1].

I'm just not quite clear at which point I can force the "consdev pc". Does this have to be in boot.cfg?

In general I am a bit confused by the boot.cfg, the different separators etc. are not yet clear to me. Is there a formal description for the format somewhere? In particular, it seems that only the first parameter between the kernel name and the ; before multiboot is accepted - otherwise it complains about an invalid parameter.

Kind regards
Matthias

p.s. I have taken note of the reference to legacy BIOS/CSM as an obvious option, but would still like to explore how far I can get with UEFI - the setup should be as future-proof as possible.


[1] https://github.com/QubesOS/qubes-issues/issues/5165


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