[ On Mon, June 29, 1998 at 18:02:30 (-0400), Bill Sommerfeld wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Solution ( was Re: BIOS question: ignore missing keyboards? ) 
>
> I just rebooted a system built out of an ASUS P2L97-S motherboard,
> which uses the Award BIOS (version 4.51G), and has a Pentium II
> plugged into it (and didn't have a keyboard plugged in at the time..)

I've extensively tested the same (well the P2L97, no scsi) motherboard
with FreeBSD-2.2-stable and have had no problems whatsoever getting it
to work with the serial console and no PC keyboard (or display adapter)
present.

Indeed with the way FreeBSD's second stage boot can be told to probe for
a keyboard and if none found use the serial console, this works like a
dream.  All I need to do now is teach it to always output to the serial
console (if given a flag telling it to do so), and then to switch
permanently (i.e. until the next reboot) to the serial console when the
keyboard disappears (eg. in the scenario where you have a multi-system
keyboard monitor mouse switch and you might boot with the keyboard
attached, but normally you want to use a serial console).

>From what I understand NetBSD's i386 serial console support isn't quite
as run-time programmable, and athe "CONSDEV_AUTO" option works in a
logically opposite manner by probing for serial ports first and waiting
for a manual response.  I kinda like the FreeBSD runtime boot.conf
support and the ability to test for a keyboard and then default to the
serial console, since as in the scenario above I would only expect the
keyboard to be present during low-level hardware/firmware mainenance
tasks.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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