In the old Itanium days, I created a PCDP table that also includes GUI console 
https://coral.googlesource.com/linux-imx/+/refs/tags/4-2/drivers/firmware/pcdp.h
 for non-Windows OSes.

Unfortunately, it did not get widely accepted, Linux on x86 still prefers to 
adopt Microsoft standards 😊.

From: Ard Biesheuvel <a...@kernel.org>
Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 12:30 AM
To: Dong Wei <dong....@arm.com>
Cc: François Ozog <francois.o...@linaro.org>, Grant Likely 
<grant.lik...@arm.com>, Jeff Booher-Kaeding <jeff.booher-kaed...@arm.com>, 
Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud <samer.el-haj-mahm...@arm.com>, mbrug...@suse.com 
<mbrug...@suse.com>, Jose Marinho <jose.mari...@arm.com>, s...@google.com 
<s...@google.com>, bill.mi...@linaro.org <bill.mi...@linaro.org>, 
boot-architecture@lists.linaro.org <boot-architecture@lists.linaro.org>, Reed 
Hinkel <reed.hin...@arm.com>, takahiro.aka...@linaro.org 
<takahiro.aka...@linaro.org>, daniel.thomp...@linaro.org 
<daniel.thomp...@linaro.org>, Mark Brown <mark.br...@arm.com>, 
ati...@atishpatra.org <ati...@atishpatra.org>, joakim.b...@linaro.org 
<joakim.b...@linaro.org>, d...@suse.de <d...@suse.de>
Subject: Re: EBBR Biweekly for 18 Jan 2021
On Tue, 19 Jan 2021 at 05:54, Dong Wei <dong....@arm.com> wrote:
>
> There is also the SPCR table 
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/serports/serial-port-console-redirection-table?redirectedfrom=MSDN
> This is the primary serial console
>

One of the issues we still have not fixed in Linux is the
inconsistency in interpretation of what 'serial console' actually
means.

On Windows, the serial console is a low-level admin interface that may
be exposed in addition to the full blown graphical user interface,
which is always available. The SPCR describes how this admin interface
is exposed, but does not affect what happens on the GUI.

In Linux, the console *is* the primary interface, either graphical or
serial. Currently, the mere presence of a SPCR is taken as an
indication that only the serial console should be enabled; for this
reason, the UEFI ports we have for platforms with PCIe expansion carry
a driver that removes the SPCR again if UEFI detects the presence of a
graphical interface.

Unfortunately, this is not something we can easily change without
breaking existing systems. Note that annotating device objects in the
DSDT is probably not the right approach here, given that this requires
the AML interpreter to be up and running before we can decide where
the console lives.

As Heinrich points out, we have a similar problem today when it comes
to the graphical interface on DT systems, i.e., it is not clear how to
convey that the user expects the interaction with the system to occur
via the graphical UI and not via a serial port. For a bootloader such
as u-boot, it should be fairly easy to suppress the stdout-path if
u-boot itself is running on the graphical display, but it would be
better to communicate the presence of this GUI *in addition to* a
serial port serving as a console.
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