[Etherboot-developers] ANSI/GFX vs SERIAL/DUAL consoles

[Peter L. <P.L...@sy...>]

I'd like to sort out the problems of GFX versus serial console (I use
"console" in the OS sense as "the place where kernel messages go", not
the commonly used PC centric sense of "video+keyboard").

We are interested in booting clusters such with the console connected to
machine readable hardware (i.e. rs232, but potentially parallel or USB)
with a console manager and/or logger on the other end; for clusters this
is the Right Thing. [*] But it's nice to have the company logo on the
video screen if there is one.

Users should be able to choose dual console "safely", - no ANSI gunk in
the wrong place - without needing to tweak the compilation image or
server configuration for one or other. So, as Etherboot interprets the
GFX/ANSI gunk, the Right Thing is to *always* interpret the ANSI,
generate output only for the video, and ignore it for the serial line,
or at least use minimal formatting. Clearing the video screen might
produce no more than a newline or page break in the serial output so
that the following text is neat. While I'm about it, I also want to
suppress the "rotating line" progress indicator. Yes, it's cute, it's
traditional, but a row of dots does the job, and doesn't clog up log
files with non-printable gunk. For completeness, it would be great to
get mknbi and loader.S messages down the serial as well.

Comments?

-- 
Peter Lister, Sychron Inc.  -  1-866-SYCHRON
Intelligent Infrastructure  -  www.sychron.com

[*] Actually, that's the short term Right Thing. The longer term Right
Thing is more interesting (and really why I'm suddenly motivated to use
Etherboot), but I'll bore you all about this at a later date.