[gentoo-releng] baselayout changes for sparc livecd

[Jason Wever]

Hi All,

In order for sparc LiveCDs to boot without errors, some changes will need
to be made to baselayout in regards to the consolefont and keymaps init
scripts  and/etc/inittab.

Basically, if a user boots via a serial console (only happens when no
monitor and no keyboard are plugged in), consolefont and keymaps will fail
to load as there's no framebuffer device to set a font on and no keyboard
for keymaps. Additionally, init will show errors spawning consoles for vc1
through vc6, and repeat the error messages every 5 minutes as it attempts
to respawn.

These changes are applicable to regular booting on a serial console based
sparc and require manual changes by the user currently.

Currently on the sparc LiveCDs, a user is supposed to append serial
to the end of their kernel boot arguments, and I have the initrd check to
see if it's set, remove the soft links in /etc/runlevels/boot for
consolefont and keymaps, and then copy an additional /etc/inittab designed
for serial consoles over the regular one.  This is a bit of a hack, but it
gets the job done.

For consolefont and keymaps, we could use the output checkconsole command
to see if the script should exit successfully out if a serial console is
detected, or have a process higher up handle it.  I haven't come up with a
good idea for the /etc/inittab however.


Any ideas (and should I file a bug for this as well)?
-- 
Jason Wever
Gentoo/Sparc Team Co-Lead