Bug 210903 - Section 25.6 (Setting up the serial console) of the Handbook has some errors and omissions
Summary: Section 25.6 (Setting up the serial console) of the Handbook has some errors ...
Status: New
Alias: None
Product: Documentation
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Books & Articles (show other bugs)
Version: Latest
Hardware: Any Any
: --- Affects Many People
Assignee: freebsd-doc (Nobody)
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2016-07-07 20:39 UTC by Matthew Fioravante
Modified: 2017-11-05 00:13 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Matthew Fioravante 2016-07-07 20:39:30 UTC
(1) In section 25.6.3: 

For the bootloader, one can use the flag -S115200 in /boot.config to set the speed instead of recompiling.

(2) In section 25.6.3:

The listed set of commands to rebuild the bootloader failed to work on new install of FreeBSD 10.3. I had to do the following:

cd /usr/src/sys/boot
MKOBJDIRPREFIX=/usr/obj make obj depend all
MKOBJDIRPREFIX=/usr/obj make install

I'm not terribly familiar with the ins and outs of the world makefiles so maybe there is a better way than this. Regardless, the instructions in the handbook are wrong and result in a build failure.

(3) It would be helpful to add a subsection on how to use a different serial port such as COM2.

The steps I figured out to do this are:

1. Search dmesg for the port number of the desired serial port (0x2f8 for COM2 usuallt)
2. Bootloader: Rebuild with BOOT_COMCONSOLE_PORT=0x2f8. There does not appear to be a command line option for this in /boot.config.
3. Console: Recompile loader with BOOT_COMCONSOLE_PORT=0x2f8 or specify comconsole_port=0x2f8 in /boot/loader.conf
4. Login: Enable the console for /dev/ttyu1 in /etc/ttys