Hi, I've implemented basic serial console support for x86. The user-visible features this brings are:
1) For QEMU/KVM, a VGA console is no longer required. i.e. you don't need X11 to rumprun and get console output. 2) Cloud hypervisors using the hw platform will now get console output. In the spirit of "convention over configuration", there are no flags to specify which console to use. The default is to use VGA unless the BIOS indicates that no VGA is present *and* a serial port is available, in which case the first serial port will be used, at 115200 baud, 8N1. I've verified that this approach works fine for local QEMU/KVM and Google Compute Engine. Amazon EC2 users, please test this on a HVM instance... I have not yet changed rumprun to use serial console by default. The change is trivial and is just adding "-nographic -vga none" to the qemu command. Example for tests/hello/hello.bin: qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -nographic -vga none -net none -m 64 -kernel tests/hello/hello.bin (use ^Ax to exit after the kernel has halted) Note that just -nographic by itself is not enough as this does not actually remove the VGA device from the VM. Please review, I'd like to change the rumprun qemu|kvm default console to serial soonish. Martin
