> just for the sake of clarity, i'm going to display my ignorance here.. to
> me, 'serial console' means a dumb terminal, like the old ADM-3a.   the 
> kind of thing where you plug into the serial console with a hand-made null
> modem cable, and pray that the keyboard still works.   if i'm off base
> here, please let me know.

Not really, but serial consoles are *way* useful for debugging and alphas and
sparcs and others support them. You don't go dig up an old ADM-3a, or even
slightly less old Wyse-30. You do a null modem cable to *another* NetBSD
system and use tip(1) in an xterm. What you get out of this, other than not
having to have expensive VGA switches or having to get off your butt and go
use another keyboard/monitor, is the ability (if you run inside screen, say)
to have a hardcopy filel of all console messages, etc. that's separate from
the system in question. Priceless for debugging.