[geeks] PC-BIOS over serial

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On 9/10/2010 12:38 AM, Bill Green wrote:
> One of the best things about SPARC hardware is OpenFirmware.
> 
> Is there anything similar currently available in the commodity PC realm?
> I'm thinking about building a headless Atom machine.  Obviously I can
> install / run the OS over a serial console, but if possible I'd like to
> be able to do initial setup that way too. It seems like EFI might be
> able to do this?  Does anybody know if there are Atom boards with EFI
> yet? Or are there other solutions I'm not aware of?
> 
> Thanks,
> Bill

It depends on the motherboard manufacturer.

Many mobo's have console redirection over serial ports; newer ones allow
you to either share an Ethernet port, or have a dedicated Ethernet port,
that allows you to get a virtual console via a web browser. In the case
of the newer ones, you can even control power to the system, doing a
hard reboot, or turning the machine on after logging on.

If using Linux, you need to set an option in grub to ensure that the
output from the boot process is sent to the TTY; otherwise you cannot
see results from booting and have to wait for the login: prompt.

--Patrick