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Serial console and "unable to open an initial console"

Serial console and "unable to open an initial console"

Post by Jonathan Edward » Sun, 31 Dec 1899 09:00:00



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

 
 
 
Top

1. "Unable to open a initial console" message

I recently installed RedHat 4.0 and have recompiled the kernel using
the 2.0.18 sources included on the CD.  Unfortunately, when I try to
boot the new kernel (using LOADLIN from DOS for the moment), the boot
procedure seems to run fine for a while (it gets through mounting my
SCSI devices, for instance), and then spits out the following error
message:

error on boot: unable to open a initial console

Unfortunately, I've no idea what might be causing this.  I went
through make config again just to be sure I hadn't removed support for
something obvious, but nothing jumped out at me.  Any ideas on this
one?  Thanks.

(Oh, if possible, please e-mail as well as or instead of posting; I
expect to be away for a couple of days and so may miss a post.
Thanks.)

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