[SAGE] sun4u sparc console at over 9600bps, anyone..?

[Janne Korkkula <jk@hut.fi>]

	Greetings from freezing Finland!

	As I'm a new list member, here's a minimal introduction, with a short
	story (on topic). I'm an unix specialist (sysadmin, if you will) at
	the Helsinki University of Technology Computing Centre. I've worked
	here for the last five years as the technical webmaster of the
	University. (Technical as in the servers are "mine", the content
	isn't.) And now, time for the story to begin...


	Serial consoles and terminal servers have been around for ages and
	they're a really great help. But the year is 2002 now, and our central
	processing units run _millions_ of instructions per second! :-) 
	Yet no-one seems to think RS-232 can do more than 9600 bps. 
	Might I be missing something important here? Yes, very likely.

	I was just fooling around with a new Sun box before it was even
	installed. It's hooked up to a Sun NTS, ie. a Bay Networks Micro
	Annex. Used to ethernet speeds, the whopping 9,6kbit/s connection
	started to bug me somewhere between the 'o' and the 'k' when the thing
	displayed those lovely letters for the very first time. I thought I
	might as well do something about it. Yes, regardless of the fact that
	the console is hardly ever needed. 
	Should be so quick and trivial to crank up at least 38400 bps, right?

				     wrong.

	cws# na
	     command: set port=8 speed 38400
	     command: reset 8

	new# eeprom ttya-mode=38400,8,n,1-

	new# vi /etc/ttydefs
	     console:38400 hupcl opost onlcr:38400::console

	new# halt

	ok reset-all
	Resetting ...þøþàøþààøøàþààààààþøøà[...this goes on for a while...]
	þøøøàþøþþþþàþøþþøconfiguring IPv4 interfaces: eri0.
	Hostname: new
	The system is coming up.  Please wait.


	38400 bps openboot - no problem.
	38400 bps console - no problem.

	Wouldn't it be nice if the boot-up sequence would honor the eeprom
	setting as well?  I even tried feedind /kernel/drv/options.conf a
	customized ttymodes-parameter obtained from a 38400 bps console
	session with 'stty -g' - actually that's the result seen above. 
	The kernel version is 5.8 Generic_108528-11; -12 is out already, 
	but somehow I don't think they've addressed this issue... :-)


	I'm very interested in any success stories - otherwise, 
	heed these deep words of experience and wisdom:

		 9600 bps should be enough for everyone.


-- 
Janne Korkkula    Helsinki University of Technology, Computing Centre
jk@hut.fi         tel. +358 9 451 4314    http://www.hut.fi/cc/u/jannek/