Setting baud rate / console device as part of 'install image'

Feature requests
,
1

Hi,

I have been using the Live CD ISO and running it within a virtual machine (VirtualBox) on my Mac laptop and using that to install VyOS on removable media (Compact Flash or SD card) in order to boot a Single Board Computer.

It would be great if it was possible to customise the Grub and initial VyOS configuration during the install process. At the moment the installer (/opt/vyatta/sbin/vyatta-grub-setup) is clever enough to customise the Grub configuration based on the tty that the installer is running in. But it doesn’t know that my target device will be a serial console. It would be great to be able to customise this without having to manual edit the grub.cfg and VyOS config file.

The APU2 has a fixed console baud rate of 115200 - unfortunately it is not possible to change it to 9600.

Happy to try writing a patch for this myself, if you think it is a reasonable idea.

nick.

2

Pass it via $GRUB_OPTIONS, I have vyos running on an apu2 for around 1 yr now.

Version: VyOS 1.2.0-rolling+201901261827
Built by: autobuild@vyos.net
Built on: Sat 26 Jan 2019 18:27 UTC
Build ID: ddcbe1bb-f380-4b10-878c-d150f1daa706

Architecture: x86_64
Boot via: installed image
System type: bare metal

Hardware vendor: PC Engines
Hardware model: APU2
Hardware S/N: Unknown
Hardware UUID: Unknown

3

For anyone finding this in Google, the default serial console baud rate was changed to 115200 in ⚓ T1327 Set the serial console speed to 115200 by default :grinning:

4

I’m currently trying to install VyOS (1.3-epa) on a Netgate SG-2440 via the console and failing after the boot screen. While in pfSense, using the 115200 baud rate I can access the device fine:

image

And even after inserting the VyOS bootable USB I get to GRUB:

image

however it dies after initializing the boot image. I’ve tried both the normal and failsafe modes, with the same result. Got real excited for a moment that I could repurpose that unit. Just to confirm, I also tried 1.2.8 with the same results.

Anyone have better luck? The bare metal instructions covers PC Engine devices, but I believe this older Netgate unit is slightly different (SeaBIOS vs coreboot, etc.).

5

@eronlloyd In case you’re still interested, I managed to boot up VyOS 1.3 on my SG-2440 after stumbling on a post (Install Debian 10 on Netgate SG-2220 via Serial Port with iSCSI Disk) which mentioned that the tty needs to be adjusted in the boot options to ttyS1
It took some attempts as the serial connection seemed to garbe my arrow key navigation, so try to do it with one key per second max

Hope this helps others searching for this :slight_smile:

6

For anybody finding this in Google, the default sequential control center baud rate was changed.