On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 07:17:16PM -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> >David Maxwell <david@fundy.ca>  wrote:
> > > Fair enough. The vast majority of people don't have Recent Intel server
> > > motherboards though - my comments were meant to be generic.
> Fair enough too. Tho I'm pretty sure I mentioned 1.4P and biosboot_com0.

Could be, I don't remember the biosboot_com reference until a couple messages
into the discussion, and I didn't catch the 1.4P at all - port-i386 vs.
current-users might have blinded me to it, as well as working on serial
consoles on 1.4 recently.

> >not to mention that many peripheral manufacturers assume 'display adapter'
> >and even worse, 'VGA display adapter'.  So while you may be able to see
> >into the BIOS, you can't configure your RAID controller...
> >(I won't include the gratuitous plug here)
> Aw, no fair. Cant you let us know which RAID controllers _do_ work
> with serial-console-BIOS? That's  gotta be worth a beer...

I think Herb _might_ be referring to the PC Weasel. ;-)
http://www.realweasel.com/intro.html

David Maxwell wrote:
> >I suspect the performance hit of convincing the NetBSD kernel to
> >write all console output via the BIOS would be pretty significant.
> 
> Who said anything about the BIOS? I'm talking about some kind of
> driver shim which sends writes to /dev/console to wscons *and* to the
> serial port (the easy part), and which accepts input from either the
> serial port or the pckbd.

Ahh. I meant to be compatible with your Intel Server Motherboard feature.

In the case of motherboards without requiring that feature, sending output
to both serial and kbd/cons should be trivial, with some changes to add
another oflag to kprintf().  Input, I've never examined.

-- 
David Maxwell, david@vex.net|david@maxwell.net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
					      - me