How to use mini-PCIe Serial port

[David Hendricks]

Some folks doing bring-up work are using mini-PCIe cards to get serial connectivity. This is useful for situations where you might not have networking or VGA available and during *very* early debugging.

Here's a brief explanation of how to get it working for Chromium OS. This is pretty generic and can apply to other distros, though the part about presenting a serial login prompt may differ.

My setup is a generic x86 netbook and an Oxford 950-based mini-PCIe to serial adapter. Here is a snippet from dmesg. Linux sets everything up nicely for this device:

[    0.676698] Serial: 8250/16550 driver, 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled

[    0.678173] serial 0000:04:00.3: PCI INT D -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18

[    0.678716] 1 ports detected on Oxford PCI Express device

[    0.678910] ttyS0: detected caps 00000700 should be 00000100

[    0.679365] 0000:04:00.3: ttyS0 at MMIO 0x50401000 (irq = 18) is a 16C950/954

[    0.679899] console [ttyS0] enabled, bootconsole disabled

The MMIO base address is important. You can obtain this information a couple of ways, but the easiest is to either look at dmesg or look at /proc/iomem:

localhost ~ # cat /proc/iomem | grep serial

    50401000-50401007 : serial

Once you know the MMIO base address, you can add this to your kernel command-line (modify UART settings as needed):

console=uart8250,mmio,0x50401000,115200n8

If you want a login prompt to appear, you'll need to add an init service to start one. Here's an example init script, /etc/init/ttyS0:

/etc/init/ttyS0:

start on startup

stop on starting halt or starting reboot

respawn

exec /sbin/agetty -L -w 115200 ttyS1 linux

Congrats, you have now turned your high-tech mini-PCIe expansion slot into a serial port. Happy hacking!

--
David Hendricks (dhendrix)
Systems Software Engineer, Google Inc.

[Nick Sanders]

You can edit the kernel commandline in the build at 

build_kernel_image.sh:120

Or, if you are running a legacy bios, you can edit sdb12:/syslinux/usb.A.cfg

on a prebuilt image.

--
Chromium OS Developers mailing list: chromiu...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-os-dev?hl=en

[David Hendricks]

For those who do a lot of serial debugging, I updated and improved these instructions to include needed Linux configuration changes and some other ideas for how to find alternate IO and MMIO addresses.

The new HOWTO is here: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/chromium-os/how-tos-and-troubleshooting/serial-debugging-howto

Enjoy!