Hi all, I'm having a strange problem. I wanted to get a serial console working, but not necessarily divert the console to the serial port at boot time, so what I did was just edit /etc/ttys as specified in FAQ part 7.7 and rehupped getty. I couldn't get a peep out of /dev/tty00 (despite ps showing getty was running on /dev/tty00), so I ran fstat /dev/tty00 and nothing showed up. Then I rebooted and checked again. Still nothing in fstat, nothing on the serial port, and getty was still running on /dev/tty00.
I added 'set tty com0' to /etc/boot.conf, rebooted, and then logged in and ran fstat /dev/tty00 to be greeted with 3 lines saying getty finally grabbed the serial port. The serial connection worked fine. So I'm just a bit confused here. Are we meant to have 'set tty com0' in boot.conf if we are to get serial console working in amd64? I tested this on 4 different machines, some were 4.4-release, others 4.4-stable and they had the same result. I haven't tried i386 yet as I don't have OpenBSD on any i386 platforms. I could just keep the 'set tty com0' in there, but I would like to know why I can't just have getty grab /dev/tty00 when told? Without the 'set tty com0', I was able to load up minicom, and specify /dev/cua00 and have it talk to minicom on a machine on the other side of the null modem cable. (I was able to echo characters back and forth.) Perhaps getty is silently failing because it can't open /dev/tty00? Thanks, Tom

