Hi,
Ok folks, finally took the time to put serial console support into seabios natively, without requiring sgabios. For now this will use the first serial port in case no vgabios was found, i.e. use something along the lines of "qemu -vga none -serial stdio" to check it out.
Design goal is to print as few control sequences as possible, so you get readable logs when writing serial output to a file, but still allow enough control that boot loader menus etc. can be used interactively.
The patches reached the first milestone now, you can boot into grub2 and use the builtin editor. And unlike sgabios it will not go crazy in case you try to move around the cursor quickly by holding down keys and let autorepeat kick in. ipxe command line editor worked too on a quick test.
known issues / todo list: * isolinux/pxelinux seems to have trouble with this. * add support for sending output to both vga and serial. * add compile time config option. * add runtime config option. * figure reasonable plan for transition from sgabios.
enjoy, Gerd
Gerd Hoffmann (2): serial console, output serial console, input
src/clock.c | 1 + src/misc.c | 2 + src/optionroms.c | 4 +- src/serial.c | 595 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ src/util.h | 3 + 5 files changed, 604 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)