[OLPC-devel] Re: No VGA probe trips up qemu

[Richard Smith]

> The "Don't probe VGA at boot" is what's causing qemu to choke on the
> kernel image.

Messing with this a bit more I've found that it really doesn't choke
qemu.   It's just doing exactly what its supposed to do.  With no VGA
there is no method for the kernel to output text to qemu and makes the
screen do the funkyness.

So unless you have a serial port console enabled you get nothing.

If you have a serial port console then you can switch to vc3
(ctrl-alt-3) and see that the kernel is up and runnning fine.
Something to remember is that the  "console=" options in the kernel
command line are order sensitive.  The last console= option is the one
that gets the console input.  So if you have mutiple console= options
then make ttyS0 last or it won't work.

If you use the -nographic option then it also works cmd line only.
(Use Crtrl-a x to exit)

A side note is that the AT keyboard is not incuded in the default
build so if you do want to disable the No VGA probe and run a
non-serial console shell then you will need to enable the AT keyboard
input device.

I guess it might be possible to use the qemu usb subsystem to funnel
usb events to the vm so a usb keyboard could be used but I'll leave
that up to someone else.

-- 
Richard A. Smith