Hi y'all!
We use a SBC with a Geode CPU (i386 compatible) and now wanted to switch off VGA console support (and the onboard graphics as well). As a console can be handy sometimes, we planned to use a serial console and built a kernel (2.4.20 with PPSKit patches) supporting this.
Now, when we boot the system everything works fine, console messages can be read over the serial port, but when the kernel finished its first initialization and init bangs in, the serial output begins to crawl.
After every 16 characters the output sleeps for approx. 10 seconds, this leads to a boot up time of 15 minutes (compared to less than 1 minute with a VGA console enabled).
Afterwards the system runs with normal speed, but everytime I try to output something on the serial port I use as a console, the output is as slow as described above.
We wonder if this is a problem with the signal pins or something like that. We tried ZOC as a terminal program as well as one or two others without a change.
If we do not use the serial port as a console, it works flawlessy.
It would be great if anyone could point us into the right direction.
Thanks in advance, kind regards,
Heiko