bug#30505: marionette/virtio-console issues lead to test failures

[Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org>]

Hi Ludo,

>I hadn’t noticed this is now part of ‘%base-services’.  It would be nice
if it were enabled on ARM only.  Thoughts?

Why?  It's not ARM-specific and there are people using headless x86 servers
posting on the mailing list :)

It's only enabled when you specify a serial port as console on the Linux
command line - that's not going to happen accidentially.

And once Linux uses the console for its messages it's nice to also have a
login process running in the end - otherwise it's kinda annoying having
only a read-only line when you sit right in front of the machine.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2018 16:54:44 +0100
ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:

> Commenting out (display "\x1b%G" (fdes->outport fd)) in (gnu services
> base) appear to solve the problem.  It seems that it used to affect just
> the terminal behind FD and now somehow broadcasts to all existing
> terminals?

It was a bad idea to do the "\x1b%G" in the first place.

There's a Linux kernel command-line parameter "vt.default_utf8" which
is set to true anyway.  In that case the iflag IUTF8 is set automatically
by Linux drivers/tty/vt/vt.c and the driver also does the same as "\x1b%G"
does in that case.

So what do these things in (gnu services base) accomplish?  Sounds like
they change nothing.

Maybe that was only done in later Linux kernels? I checked 3.4.103, it did that
already.