In message <3708F1A3.229A34F@phxase.allied.com>Philip Tait writes
>I'm in the process of upgrading some DECstations from OpenBSD to
>NetBSD/pmax 1.3.3.  One major feature of the DECstation 5000/2xx is that
>I can configure it as a server, with a serial console, and use the mouse
>and keyboard ports as two extra serial ports - at least I could until I
>tried this with NetBSD.  It appears that there is a hardcoded assumption
>that these ports are used only for the mouse and keyboard.  I found that
>the baud rate could not be changed from 4800, and at one point in my
>efforts I saw a syslog message indicating a "keyboard error".
>
>I submitted this as "Problem Report #7255", but I would welcome any
>clues that would help me fix it myself.

hi Philip,
I've been waiting until someone asked for this....

I suspect the biggest problem is the console code which tries to
initialize a mouse and keyboard even if they aren't used as OS
console, so that a framebuffer-with-X plus serial-console setup works.
That wil send mouse and lk201 init strings (4800,weird parity) to the
serial lines, which will probably be garbage to your serial device.

The setup you want is intended to work, if you create the
special-device files for /dev/tty{b,d} on an ioasic machine,
or the corresponding devices for the dc chip for a 5000/200.

If that doesn't work on 1.3.3, can you try installing a 1.4_ALPHA
snapshot and see if it works there? If it doesn't, we'll try and fix
it for the 1.4 release. It may require a config option and rebuilding
a custom kernel, though.