Re: Problem with 7.0 RC3 on headless Ultra 60

[Eduardo Horvath <eeh%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 6 Sep 2015, Bill Roman wrote:

> I'm new to this list, fairly new to Sun gear, and have some basic
> familiarity with NetBSD (like I've installed it on a SPARCstation 5 and
> Ultra 10 and played around a little).
> 
> We had a big clear-out at work, and there was a pile of Sun gear that I
> rescued from scrapping, including three Ultra 60s that I'd like to get
> working.  None of them have any video at all.  They are in various
> states of disrepair.  NVRAM batteries are dead on all of them.
> 
> The one that seems to work the best completes its power-on diagnostics
> and can boot the NetBSD 7.0 RC3 Sparc64 CD.  But it gets stuck at the
> first terminal input, tail end of what comes out the serial port is:
> 
> warning: no /dev/console
> 
> 
> You are using a serial console, we do not know your terminal emulation.
> Please select one, typical values are:
> 
>         vt100
>         ansi
>         xterm
> 
> Terminal type (just hit ENTER for 'vt220'):
> 
> At this point it doesn't respond to typing either on the serial port or
> the Sun keyboard.  The Sun keyboard works a bit at this point (Stop-A
> breaks to the debugger, and it can power the system off).
> 
> The serial port works for console output, but not for input; I have to
> type on the Sun keyboard to interact with the firmware.
> 
> I feel rather ignorant about these machines, can anyone with more
> experience offer me a little advice?

OpenBOOT has two environmental variables:

input-device
output-device

The default, I think, is "console".  If set to that, OBP will attempt to 
figure out what's connected to the box and use the keyboard and video card 
if it detects a keyboard, or serial port and serial port if it does not.

If those values have been overridden from the default, you can get strange 
configurations like the one you seem to have with "input-device" set to 
"kayboard" and "output-device" set to "serial".

Originally, the kernel would get the values of "input-device" and 
"output-device" from the firmware and use those devices, so a 
configuration like the one you have would work.  However, $#@!$% 
wscons assumes it has control of both input and output, so you can't split 
the console across devices if one of them is wscons.

If you know you want to use the serial port for both input and output I 
recommend you explicitly set the "input-device" and "output-device" 
variables to "serial":

setenv input-device serial
setenv output-device serial

You can set the values to any of the devaliases or full path to the device 
node, although I would restrict it to keyboard, display or serial devices 
since setting your "output-device" to "disk" may not work so well.

Eduardo