On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> I've heard that some motherboard supports serial consoles, including for
> BIOS configurations.
> Does someone have references of such hardware, and experiences with NetBSD ? 
> Thanks.

I've seen that on some old 386 (or was it a 286?), Phoenix BIOS. There
were very few settings, but one of them was "serial console at ___".
With that, you're able to see the video id and the memory countdown on
a VT. Whoopeee. I never ended up running NetBSD on that machine; the
same junk pile had a better 386.

I have a VLB 486 on my desk at work with a vt420 for a console, but
with no BIOS support. Once you get to the booter prompt, it's just
like a regular console, except you can cut and paste from the debugger
prompt after a crash, or cut and paste to the other session on it's
twin (which has a monitor). That's pretty cool!

Any kind of console has to use software handshaking, which is fine for
the vt, since it can't do hw handshaking. Higher than 19200, and the
debugger become illegible (even though it still responds), but that's
a limitation of the vt420. I made a custom gettytab entry with sw
handshaking so I could log in on the same terminal and use "vi". For
casual use that's not really necessary.