NFS root : get "Unable to open initial console"

by Brian McIlwra » Wed, 10 Jun 1998 04:00:00

: I'm trying to boot a PC from a floppy onto an NFS root.
: I have bootp running on the server, get the IP and everything OK,
: then it says that it has mounted the NFS root partition. Straight
: after that I get "unable to open initial console" and the machine
: hangs.

I was reading the new "Linux kernels internals" book at a friends house
last weekend and, by accident, noticed this error message.
As I recall it tries to open first /dev/tty0 then /dev/ttyS1 as the console
terminal - if both these fail it outputs this message.

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1. Serial console and "unable to open an initial console"

Running RedHad 6.1, I tried to follow the instrucitons in
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/serial-console.txt to create a serial console.

I get a bunch of "boot-type" messages (hardware addresses, IRQs, etc.) on
ttyS0, then it gets to "Freeing unused kernel memory" and complains "Warning:
unable to open an initial console". initd then proceeds to write all its
messages to the VGA display.

ls -l /dev/console shows crw--w--w- 1 root root 5,0 and ls -l /dev/ttyS0
shows crw--w--w- 1 root tty 4,64

I think I rebuilt the kernel with CONFIG_CONSOLE_SERIAL=y (and that appears
in /usr/src/linux/configs/kernel-2.2.12-i686.config) and did the other things
the doc called for, and clearly it's partly working, but I must have
overlooked something.

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Jonathan Edwards

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