Re: How to enable PC-Console on boot

[Matthias Petermann <mp%petermann-it.de@localhost>]

Am 02.02.2021 um 17:10 schrieb Pierre-Philipp Braun:
> > In general I am a bit confused by the boot.cfg, the different 
> > separators etc. are not yet clear to me. Is there a formal description 
> > for the format somewhere? In particular, it seems that only the first 
> > parameter between the kernel name and the ; before multiboot is 
> > accepted - otherwise it complains about an invalid parameter.
>
> What about trying `console=pc` as first and even single argument to 
> netbsd?  Right, it's `load ... console=` not `consdev`, but with the 
> same available arguments.  The latter is rather used to switch console 
> interactively at the boot prompt.  I've seen that before, it's magic.
>
> > This is similiar to what I tried before, but it obviously does not 
> > boot the system (at least I can't reach it via SSH). Since I don't see 
> > anything on the console, I can only speculate. My intermediate 
> > conclusion is that apparently specifying root=NAME=root and console=pc 
> > at the same time invokes some kind of conflict. Hence the question for 
> > a formal description of boot.cfg, which would be helpful for this 
> > probably quite special case. In all examples I found with multiboot 
> > only one or no parameter is attached behind the NetBSD kernel.
>
> It does not really matter that the system does not boot so far.  Our 
> focus here is to get your console to show up!  Just get rid of the root= 
> argument to start with or eventually try to get to the prompt somehow, 
> and see if `consdev` works?

So I tried:

menu=Boot Xen:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz console=pc;multiboot /xen.gz 
dom0_mem=512M console=vga dom0_max_vcpus=1 dom0_vcpus_pin

as well as

menu=Boot Xen:load /netbsd-XEN3_DOM0.gz consdev=pc;multiboot /xen.gz 
dom0_mem=512M console=vga dom0_max_vcpus=1 dom0_vcpus_pin

with no notable change. So I still get the Xen boot message displayed or 
about one second, and then the screen gets cleared and remains empty.

Kind regards
Matthias