Re: /dev/console should it always be available?

From: Theodore Y. Ts'o (tytso@MIT.EDU)
Date: Sat Feb 26 2000 - 16:38:05 EST


   Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 11:45:01 -0500
   From: Mike Panetta <mpanetta@realminfo.com>

   Should /dev/console always be available even if there is no
   video card or keyboard on a machine? I keep getting these
   messages in the logs about init not being able to open(/dev/console)
   when I remove the video card from an embedded box I am working on.
   when I do this strange things start to happen like it cannot properly
   umount /dev/hda5 (not root partition) on shutdown, and mingetty starts
   to respawn to fast. This is related to a previous message I sent to the
   list about a week ago reguarding the ext2 corruption messages without
   a video card in the machine. Since then I have upgraded all the libraries
   to be compilant with the rquirements in Documentation/Changes and the
   corruption has gone away. Now I am stuck with unclean mounts and other
   random occurences...

If you have an embedded box, your best bet is to redirect the console
output to a serial console. This allows you to monitor your system
simply and easily simply by attaching an RS-232 cable.

As far as mingetty respawning to fast, that's almost certainly because
you have an entry in /etc/iniitab which for /dev/tty[123456] which isn't
going to exist if you don't have a video card installed. Edit
/etc/inittab to fix that problem.

                                                - Ted

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 29 2000 - 21:00:15 EST