>On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Donald Lee wrote:
>
>> Possibly coincidentally, this second hang happened about the time that I
>> did a "quit" on the Z-term session that I had been using to access the serial
>> console on the machine.
>>
>> My theory is that the somewhat broken serial on the machine was blocking
>> syslog because syslogd was trying to write to /dev/console.  Everything that
>> generated a console message (like su) would eventually hang because of
>> this blockage.
>>
>> Has anyone else seen anything like this?  Any opinions?
>
>Do you have flow control on on the port?
>
>Usually when terminal programs quit, they send a break sequence out the
>serial port. That will usually put a kernel in ddb. When you fire the
>terminal program back up, are you in ddb? If not, and if you have flow
>control on on the port, the system may be seeing flow control going to
>stop, hanging the console.
>
>Take care,
>
>Bill

I don't end up in ddb, and I've started and stopped Z-term many times to
look at the console on this box without anything "bad" happening. I had
presumed that it was safe(!).

The flow control on ttya is unknown.  Z-term does not request it, but the
behavior on the NetBSD side is the question.  This gets back to whether serial
ports work correctly.  I contend that they don't, and need to be
fixed.  So, I'm being punished for not fixing the driver....

-dgl-