I decided to tackle getting the DIRECT_SERIAL option working this
afternoon (after shovelling a foot and a half of fresh snow and drifts
off my driveway!  It's finally winter in Toronto! ;-).

It didn't take more than two minutes after my first attempt to realize
that I probably hadn't turned off "crtscts" on the 'cu' port when I'd
last tried this feature (but I must have when I tried a boot block which
was built for 38400 by someone else, and then when I quit 'cu' to reset
to 9600 and "crtscts" was restored).  Watching the lights on my breakout
box quikly revealed that the DIRECT_SERIAL code doesn't raise the CTS
line, so with a full null modem and hardware handshaking enabled in your
terminal you're fighting an impossible battle to send characters to the
boot menu.  A quick re-patch of my breakout box to create a 3-wire
full-handshake null-modem and everything works perfectly!

I still don't know what's wrong with the BIOS I/O option, but at this
point I don't really care....

Once I've cleaned up my patches I'll send-pr my changes as a proposal to
improve the serial console selection policy on i386.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>