Serial console

Supported Serial Ports

SuperI/O with integrated UARTs

coreboot supports a variety of SuperI/O chips with UART functionality. If your mainboard has a serial port built-in, you can use it with no or minimal changes.

PCIe/Mini PCIe based serial cards

Experimental coreboot and libpayload support is available for the StarTech MPEX2S952 card. In order to use the card for romstage debugging, minimal setup of the PCIe bridge and the MPEX2S952 have to be added to romstage.c, otherwise the card is only available after the resource allocator has been running.

USB to Serial Converters

USB to serial converters are not supported by coreboot at this time.

Enabling Serial Console

In order to get serial console output from various components of your system special options may be needed. This page tries to give a short description of how to use these options.

coreboot

In coreboot you have to set up serial console support during configuration. Enable Console--> Serial port console output. You will be able to choose the UART and baud rate settings in the same menu.

FILO

FILO picks up coreboot's serial console configuration, if compiled with serial console support.

GRUB legacy

In your boot/grub/menu.lst add the following:

serial --unit=0 --speed=115200
terminal --timeout=15 serial console

Change --unit=0 to --unit=1 for the second serial port (COM2).

GRUB2

TODO

Linux kernel command line

Add

console=ttyS0,115200 console=tty0

to send debug output to both the serial console on COM1 and to VGA.

Linux login prompt

In /etc/inittab add/enable a line like this:

T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 vt100

Change ttyS0 to ttyS1 for COM2.

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