Using the original BIOS and the same kernel with "console=ttyS0,115200" works.
On Sat, 2007-08-04 at 04:40 -0400, Corey Osgood wrote:
Eyal Cohen wrote:
FILO version 0.4.2 (eyal@mainmachine) Sun Jul 1 06:26:04 IDT 2007 Press <Enter> for default boot, or <Esc> for boot prompt... timed out boot: hda1:/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1 console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200 hda: LBA 40GB: ST340810A Mounted ext2fs Found Linux version 2.6.21.5 (eyal@mainmachine) #5 PREEMPT Thu Jul 5 11:50:44 ID T 2007 bzImage. Loading kernel... ok Jumping to entry point...
It looks like your kernel may not be compiled with serial console support. The best check I know of is to boot the system up with the stock bios, then interrupt grub, edit the kernel options to include "console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200", and then see what happens on your serial terminal. If that can't be easily done, check your kernel config file, and make sure serial support is compiled in (no modules, unless you want to load an initrd), along with serial console, etc, etc.
Also, make sure you allow the kernel some time to load, it does take a bit. If you're interested in speeding it up, look for Peter Stuge's FILO IDE Speedup patch in the archives, which is for filo-0.5 (which can be grabbed with svn co svn://openbios.org/filo/trunk/filo-0.5)
hope this helps -Corey