Hello,

> after weeks of waiting for my serial cable components (the soldering iron 
> powered always powered on to get to work ASAP ;) i gave up.

Bad post service, or bad company?

> now, i'm a bit confused what to do to get/stay connected when the booting 
> kernel fails (see [1])...

Not sure about that. I've been looking all over for documentation for MCHK 
traps since I've been seeing them about once a month (not often enough to 
figure out what to do about it).

> i guess that i can do this by tweaking the kernel config (see [2]), i do not 
> need to set OF to output on the serial port [3]...?

It's probably easier and better to just set things in OF; you can do a 
shutdown -h now and get into OF (usually) if you want to make changes via 
the serial console, but if you don't change it, it's back to the keyboard 
/ monitor.

> if so, the manual says that the Griffin Stealth uses the scca device -- how 
> do i configure this in the kernel configuration?
>
> is this sufficient?
>
>  #options 	DDB			# in-kernel debugger
>  #options 	DDB_HISTORY_SIZE=100	# enable history editing
>
> and uncomment (or add) the following three lines:
>
>  options 	KGDB		# remote debugger
>  options 	"KGDB_DEVNAME=\"com\"",KGDB_DEVADDR=0x3f8,KGDB_DEVRATE=9600
>  makeoptions	DEBUG="-g"	# compile full symbol table
>
> is wonder because the remote debuggers' device name is 'com', and i don't 
> know whether 0x3f8 fits in.

0x3f8 definitely wouldn't fit. I've never tried KGDB (not sure if it 
works), but the regular debugger works fine from a Stealth serial port. 
The only addition to options DDB you should add would be:

options         ZS_CONSOLE_ABORT# allow break to get into DDB on serial

Good luck!

John