Console redirection for UEFI and IPMI-SOL

[Ravi Pokala]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to bring 12.1-RELEASE up on a new hardware platform. The system will boot from an NVMe device, so it must boot using UEFI.

I've installed UEFI-based systems several times before, without any trouble. But for those previous platforms, the VGA console was all I needed; on this new platform, I need a serial console, using IPMI Serial-Over-LAN. I've set up SOL plenty of times before too... but only on BIOS-based systems. It's the combination of UEFI+SOL which seems to be causing me problems.

When I boot, I see output from loader.efi on both the VGA and the SOL consoles; they report the console type as "efi". When the kernel starts running, I only see the output on the VGA console, not the SOL console. My ideal configuration -- which is what I have on my BIOS-based systems -- is:

- bootloader on both VGA console and SOL console
- kernel output on both VGA console and SOL console
- single-user prompt on whichever I selected as the primary (first in the 'console' list in /boot/loader.conf)
- login prompts on both consoles after `getty' has started.

On the aforementioned previous BIOS+SOL systems, /boot/loader.conf contains the following:

| boot_serial="YES"
| console="comconsole vidconsole"
| kern.vty="vt" # 10.x; different on 12.1?
| hw.vga.textmode="1"

When I used those same settings on the UEFI systems, loader.efi complains about "vidconsole" not being valid, and I got no more output anywhere. Changing that to "efi" let me get the kernel messages on the VGA console, but still nothing on the SOL.

I'm happy to provide more info about the platform; just tell me what commands to run to gather it.

Thanks,

Ravi (rpokala@)