I’m running my P550 headless and accessing the console serial port through the MCU telnet function.
For some reason the grub menu is very large and doesn’t fit in my 80x25 terminal emulator window, making the menu look very ugly.
The terminal output is set to “console”, which I assume means that grub uses EFI calls to U-Boot to access the serial port.
Where am I supposed to change something to get a 80x25 sized grub menu that fits in my terminal? The GRUB_GFXMODE setting has no effect, which makes sense since the console is not graphical…
Thanks.
After much digging through both the grub and u-boot codebase, I was finally able to find the answer myself.
At the U-Boot prompt:
setenv stdout serial
setenv stderr serial
saveenv
This gives you a standard 80x25 menu. Weird that you can’t just set whatever window size you want…
If stdout starts with ‘vidconsole’, the size of the video output window is used.
If stedout does not start with ‘vidconsole’ or the video console does not exist, U-Boot sends a query to the terminal which should respond with the screen size. If no response is received, the default is 80x25.
As most terminal emulators respond with their screen size, there is not need for a command to set the screen size in U-Boot explicitly.
Well, “video console does not exist” must mean something other than that there is no actual video display connected, because I’m running the system headless in a rack and it still picks the too large size as long as ‘vidconsole’ is in stdout.
The query for terminal size does not seem to work through the MCU:s telnet bridge (which doesn’t seem to actually implement the telnet protocol (RFC854) either, I had to disable local echo manually)…
Hi @marcus,
Could you please share the software details which you are using to open console of serial port. I believe you are using same software for processor and MCU console.
Sure.
MCU firmware:
BMC Version:2.6
SOM firmware:
Firmware version:1.2
OpenSBI v1.4
U-Boot 2024.01 (Nov 06 2024 - 05:26:46 +0000)
GNU GRUB version 2.12
This is all as it was installed on delivery. I have not changed the SPI or eMMC flash contents, just added a SATA disk for my own OS install.
@marcus Could you let me know which terminal emulator you’re using? For example, Minicom or PuTTY?
XTerm(396)
Minicom is for directly using serial ports, but as I said I’m using telnet to the MCU to access the SOM console port.
Hi @marcus
We have reproduced the issue and need to verify the MCU firmware. Our firmware team is currently on vacation, and we will get back to you once they return.
@RahulMoorkoth No worries, the workaround of removing vidconsole from stdout/stderr to get 80x25 is good enough for me at the moment. 