[2.2.14/5/6] occasionally no virtual terminals after boot with sercon

From: Florian Lohoff (flo@rfc822.org)
Date: Mon Jun 12 2000 - 09:41:37 EST

Hi,
i am regularly (but non reproducable) seeing the problem that after
booting a "headless" system (No Monitor, No Keyboard but GFX Card (Very
old ISA) and PS/2 Connector) this machine lacks the Virtual Terminals
on VGA - This shows up because i get "Respawning to fast" for all Getty
and my syslogd hangs infinite because i have a *.* /dev/tty12 in the
syslog.conf

When examining /proc/tty/drivers you see the difference - This is the
machine lacking the driver:

root@source:~# cat /proc/tty/drivers
pty_slave /dev/pts 136 0-255 pty:slave
pty_master /dev/ptm 128 0-255 pty:master
pty_slave /dev/ttyp 3 0-255 pty:slave
pty_master /dev/pty 2 0-255 pty:master
serial /dev/cua 5 64-67 serial:callout
serial /dev/ttyS 4 64-67 serial
/dev/tty0 /dev/tty0 4 0 system:vtmaster
/dev/ptmx /dev/ptmx 5 2 system
/dev/console /dev/console 5 1 system:console
/dev/tty /dev/tty 5 0 system:/dev/tty

As you can see its lacking this line:

unknown /dev/tty 4 1-63 console

This machine normally runs as "Serial Console" means it has the following
parms in the lilo.conf

root@source:~# cat /etc/lilo.conf
[...]
serial=0,9600n8
append="console=ttyS0,9600"
[...]

The lack of VGA Consoles only happens occasionally and doesnt seem
to be reproducable.

There is nothing special in the kernel bootup messages but i get modprobe
trying to load the appropriate module:

request_module[char-major-4]: waitpid(4041,...) failed, errno 512
request_module[char-major-4]: waitpid(5036,...) failed, errno 512
request_module[char-major-4]: waitpid(5044,...) failed, errno 512
request_module[char-major-4]: waitpid(5052,...) failed, errno 512

I have seen this on this Dual Celeron 400 and a i810 based board
so this is not Hardware related but could be a "Serial Console"
intialization race condition or something.

I have seen this at least with 2.2.14 15 and now with 16

Flo 

-- 
Florian Lohoff		flo@rfc822.org		      	+49-waiting-4-telekom
     "If you're not having fun right now, you're wasting your time."

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:25 EST