On Tue, Jan 18, 2000 at 08:29:53PM -0800, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> A late-december-ish -current. It never crossed my mind to send
> something so horribly x86-specific to current-users; thatd be
> net.abuse to every other port. In retrospect I can see how it'd be
> confusing.

Those are always a tough call. I guess I just expect more -current
users are sure to read -current-users :-)

> Which (it seems) has the "hit a key" test backwards for any sane use
> of a serial console. I want serial consoles because I want to bput the
> boxes in a wiring closet, to get logs of the console if they crash or

Yes, I'd agree. I think it was sort of patterned on Sun's boot method.
If you use CONSDEV_COMx, you could enable the port in the BIOS, then
when you need to use the non-serial console, disable it in the BIOS,
I think that's the intent. It's more complex than what I'd like 
though.

The best would be prompting on both devices, and taking the one that
replies. A timeout could pick the 'default' device, as compiled in,
or set in some NV storage. That may not be there to avoid provoking
problems in writing to a non-existant video card, but it seems
quite reasonable to supply a different set of boot-blocks for that
application. Mostly, (I think) people want to save the space taken
up by a monitor, but have a (cheap) video card installed so issues
can be quickly resolved when needed. If you're going to rip the
machine open to install a video card...

> And forcing XON/XOFF with DIRECT_CONSOLE is just ... broken, given the
> existence of BIOS serial consoles which want RTS/CTS hardware handshaking.

I'm sure there's a reason there, I'm a bit confused - cvsweb tells me
that that man page was created in Dec, 1997, by Matthias Drochner -
but the code that it refers to didn't seem to be that old. The page
existed in 1.3! I'm sure someone who knows will set this all right.

> Meanwhile, the console(4) manpage is woefully out of date.  Shouldn't
> it .Xr to boot_console() and warn that its for the old, pre-1.4,
> bootblocks?

When in distress, send-pr! :-)

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