[GXemul-devel] gxemul serial terminal output stops until key is pressed

[Andreas G. <gs...@gs...>]

Hi gxemul-devel,

I'm having a strange problem trying to boot NetBSD/hpcmips 8.1 on
gxemul-trunk on Linux.  When the install ramdisk kernel boots, the
serial terminal output unexpectedly stops somewhere in the middle of
the boot messages, before showing the sysinst installation menu.

However, if I then press a key, the output continues.  Sometimes it
stops again and I have to press a key again multiple times before it
gets all the way to sysinst.  This is of course easy to work around
when installing manually, but it makes automated installs using anita
impossible.

I have reproduced this behavior on two different Linux systems:
"gumbo" which runs Debian 9, and an Amazon EC2 t2.micro instance
running Amazon Linux 2 (ami-0b898040803850657).

This problem does not happen when running gxemul on NetBSD 8.0 or
macOS 10.14.5.  I have not tested other gxemul versions nor other
guests with respect to this particular problem.  gxemul-trunk.tar.gz
was retrieved today and has a sha1 checksum
8bfd6c81e28b0cc182758fc8803490a0e3462af2.
  
To reproduce the problem, run the following shell script on a Linux
system.  If the guest boots all the way to sysinst, exit gxemul
(control-c quit enter) and run the script again; you may need a few
tries, but sooner or later the console output will stop before sysinst
starts.

#!/bin/sh
set -xe
test -f gxemul-trunk.tar.gz || wget http://gavare.se/gxemul/src/gxemul-trunk.tar.gz
test -f netbsd.gz || wget http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-8.1/hpcmips/installation/netbsd.gz
ls -al gxemul-trunk.tar.gz
shasum gxemul-trunk.tar.gz || true
test -f gxemul-trunk/gxemul || (
  gunzip <gxemul-trunk.tar.gz | tar xfv -
  cd gxemul-trunk
  sh configure
  make -j4
)
test -f wd0.img || dd if=/dev/zero of=wd0.img bs=1024k count=1536
gxemul-trunk/gxemul -M 48 -d wd0.img -emobilepro880 netbsd.gz

-- 
Andreas Gustafsson, gs...@gs...