dan@uunet.uu.net (Dan Mick) (03/16/90)
I have a Sun-4/110 that I need to get talking to the serial port on bootup (in the ROM monitor). Okay; I see from eeprom(8) and /usr/include/<something/eeprom.h that I can set the "boot console" (offset 0x1F, field name eed_console) to 'ttya' or '0x10' to make the boot console device be serial port A. They lie. My 4/110 is set that way, and the terminal on ttya is fine when I boot up multiuser and log in with it, but on bootup, the console is still the console. This wouldn't be so bad save for the absolutely horrible performance of the console on a 4/110 (can you say about .75 sec for *every scroll*, and about 10 sec response time to ^C?), so I really need to have another usable terminal on this thing before any OS gets booted (I need to do some kernel debugging). How the blazes do I get the eeprom to listen to me? Is there some other field somewhere I have to set? Do I have an old PROM? What am I doing wrong? Keep sending those letters! <grin>
larrys@uwm.edu (03/20/90)
The CPU is probably too dumb to know what you intend when making 1F equal to 0x10. Try leaving the keyboard unplugged and see what happens. Of course, when you want to use the console as a login port, you have to plug in the keyboard, but when the screen says Abort at such-and-such > just type c return to restart the computer where you left off. Of course, when you leave the keyboard unplugged and ttytab says "on secure" for the console entry, the whole computer will die the death, so you have to turn off the console. Or else, you can boot singleuser, plug in the keyboard, type c, type exit or control d on the terminal for multiuser startup, because when you boot singleuser, the ttytab file is not consulted. By now you are saying "isn't there some- thing reasonable I can do?". Maybe so, but all I know is these emergency measures. Maybe I should have been a shyster lawyer. Larry Apex