Re: Booting NetBSD 8 install image on PC Engines apu2d4 via serial console goes blank

[Mike Pumford <mpumford%mudcovered.org.uk@localhost>]

On 30/12/2018 15:59, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> I'm trying to install NetBSD 8 on a PC Engines apu2d4
>
>    https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2d4.htm
>
> via a USB thumb drive with a NetBSD 8 install image
>
>    https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.0/images/NetBSD-8.0-amd64-install.img.gz
Yes but you need to reconfigure the bootloader (which can be done on an 
existing NetBSD system) to set things up so the kernel uses the serial 
console. The other alternative (assuming you are able to do keyboard 
input) is to set the console to com0 using the interactive bootloader.

For installboot assuming the usb install image is detected as sd0 on 
another netbsd system you can do:

installboot -e -o console=com0 /dev/rsd0a

You should also be able to do the same thing when installing as well. 
One thing I found with this is that this stopped the keyboard working in 
the bootloader but I didn't figure out why.

One other thing is I'd recommend a recent (last 2weeks or newer) 8.0 
snapshot as this contains the change that makes NetBSD recognise the APU 
SATA controller properly although I've found it works pretty well with 
an high speed SD card as the disk.

ACPI and SMP both work perfectly.

Mike