Bug#776566: Please cater to serial consoles
On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 04:05:45PM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> 29.01.2015 15:12, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > martin f krafft, le Thu 29 Jan 2015 11:52:36 +0100, a écrit :
> >> 2. the boot: prompt appears on both, console and serial console,
> >
> > Nack with my brltty maintainer hat: you don't want to send things on the
> > serial port without the user saying to do this. In the case of braille
> > devices, we have already seen some device being bricked by such behavior
> > because it unfortunately made the device enter a ROM-flash mode...
>
> Some serial-connected models of Powercom UPSes will turn off power after
> seeing this sequence... ;) I don't remember which code it is exactly,
> but it is a single char from lowercase latin letters.
Hmm, according to the driver the character is \xba (so not a standard
latin character) but of course get the baud rate wrong (which you almost
certainly will) and who knows what characters you end up sending.
So I agree, there are many reasons not to assume what is connected to
the serial port.
Devices can have lots of serial ports, and who is to say if any of them
should be a console or not, and even if they are, at what baud rate?
And certainly serial consoles are not a common use case on x86 machines.
--
Len Sorensen
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