There seems to be no way to elegantly handle serial console clients.
In the past, one already had to copy e.g.
daily/i386/pxelinux.cfg/default to the UUID-specific file of
a client, thereby hardcoding daily/i386 for this client and forgoing
the possibility of chosing via the menu. One also had to manually
add the "serial" and "console" parameters to this file, and change
the reference to menu.cfg to serial.cfg, which often also required
changes when e.g. ttyS1 was to be used, or vga=778 just did not
work.

Now it seems that serial.cfg is no longer provided at all.

It would be really great if di-netboot-install went one of the
following ways instead:

  1. a DHCP option flags a given client as having a serial console,
     causing the menu to be displayed on the specified serial
     console, as well as the kernel parameters set accordingly;

  2. the boot: prompt appears on both, console and serial console,
     and if <enter> is received on the serial console, then that's
     where stuff continues, else a normal install happens.

  3. displaying the menu on both consoles and letting the user
     select "serial" if appropriate.

Thanks for your consideration.

martin f krafft, le Thu 29 Jan 2015 11:52:36 +0100, a écrit :
serial port without the user saying to do this. In the case of braille
devices, we have already seen some device being bricked by such behavior
because it unfortunately made the device enter a ROM-flash mode...

Samuel

29.01.2015 15:12, Samuel Thibault wrote:

Some serial-connected models of Powercom UPSes will turn off power after
seeing this sequence... ;)  I don't remember which code it is exactly,
but it is a single char from lowercase latin letters.

Thanks,

/mjt

Hmm, according to the driver the character is \xba (so not a standard
latin character) but of course get the baud rate wrong (which you almost
certainly will) and who knows what characters you end up sending.

So I agree, there are many reasons not to assume what is connected to
the serial port.

Devices can have lots of serial ports, and who is to say if any of them
should be a console or not, and even if they are, at what baud rate?
And certainly serial consoles are not a common use case on x86 machines.