Bug#489005: debian-installer: Grub unconditionally set to use serial console when an install takes place via the serial port.
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20070308etch2
Severity: important
If an install takes place via a serial console (e.g. by passing
console=/dev/ttyS0 via the d-i boot loader), d-i then configures grub to
use serial console output.
On machines with "serial BIOS" support, grub then fails to boot, and no
output is seen from the serial port. This occurs, because the BIOS is
copying information from the VGA text buffer to the serial port, and
this interferes with grub's use of the serial port.
Once the kernel has been loaded, and it switches to protected mode, the
BIOS VGA -> serial copying code stops, and the boot proceeds via the
serial console as expected.
An option to supress the grub serial output would fix this problem
(which probably also applys to the use of lilo).
This behaviour has been observed on an Intel SR1500 machine, but I've
observed the same behaviour in the past on multiple different x86
machines.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.25-2-amd64
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
-- no debconf information
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