Re: serial console unplugged, boot hangs, help !

["Adam N. Thompson, MCNE, MCSE" <athompso@commerced.com>]

> nothing else happens on the VGA screen. Great, ...but... I checked
> what happens if the terminal (minicom on Linux in my case) is
> unplugged at boot time, and the boot process *hangs* !! When I plug
> in the console, it all starts happenning immediately - as if the boot
> program is waiting on some characters or response back from the
> terminal.

www.Blackbox.com

See item#w AC242A, AC243A, AC244A or AC245A  - "Keyboard Ghost".
It's usually a hardware problem.

Alternately, if you're talking about the *serial* console, then you
probably just need to make sure hardware flow control is *NOT* turned on
for the console during boot time.  Some of the ttyio stuff is blocking.
Even the normally non-blocking ttyio calls can block if the kernel ttyio
buffers are full.  Used to have this problem all the time on headless
Sun boxen.

No idea where to check for that under OpenBSD, though.  Sorry.

--
Adam Thompson, MCNE, MCSE, CWT, A+
Vice-President / Chief Technology Officer, Commerce Design Inc.
<athompso@commerced.com>
tel: (204) 942-1648, fax: (204) 989-8080, cell: (204) 782-6198