On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 09:57:49AM +0100, Gert Doering wrote:

> Is there a way to get "kernel oops" messages to the serial console,

That's "panic".  "oops" is a linuxism.  

> even if keyboard+monitor are connected to the system?  I have a PC with
> a spare serial port available, and it would be useful to actually see
> what happened, instead of just seeing "hmmm, frozen.  bad.  power-cycle
> now."

Well, in principle you could set the OBP input and output devices to
the serial port.  This means that OBP will talk to the serial port 
instead of the keyboard/display, so you will need something attached
to the serial port so you can boot the machine initially.

In practice, things start to break down if you do that.  First of all,
OBP only initializes the screen if it's the console device.  But that
shouldn't really be a problem since the machfb driver should be smart
enough to initialize the framebuffer itself.  A bigger issue is that
the last time I tried it wscons is not capable of functioning if it's
not the console.  As far as I'm concerned, that's a major flaw in 
wscons.  If you could get wscons to attach properly and not panic the
machine, you should then be able to tell the X server to attach to
the wscons display and run your session there.

Finally, if the machfb driver is capable of initializing the display
it should also be capable of taking over the console from the X server.
That it doesn't should be considered a bug.

Eduardo