Re: 2.5.26 broken on headless boxes

[Petr Vandrovec]

On 18 Jul 02 at 22:18, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 18, 2002 at 11:04:54PM +0200, Petr Vandrovec wrote:
> > You have enabled CONFIG_VT without CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE and 
> > CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE. It is illegal configuration.
> 
> Huh.  So CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE is not enough any more?  I really do think
> this should be documented in Config.help.

CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE works other way around. If you set CONFIG_VT_CONSOLE,
/dev/console can be displayed on your VTs (on your screen).

CONFIG_VGA_CONSOLE/CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE determines whether your VT can
be created at all - maybe _CONSOLE suffix is misleading - without
having at least one displaying device virtual terminals cannot be build.
I always thought that CONFIG_DUMMY_CONSOLE cannot be unset, but
apparently it can...

And BTW, when such configuration worked for you last time? It does not
look to me like that it should ever work.

> > To fix oopses, either enable 'Framebuffer devices' under 'Console
> > drivers' section (you do not have to enable any fbdev driver, just
> > check this option...), or disable CONFIG_VT. See arch/*/kernel/setup.c
> > for explanation, no code in VT subsystem kernel expects conswitchp == NULL,
> > but couple of architectures leaves sometime conswitchp uninitialized.
> 
> well, this is on x86 ...
                                                    Petr Vandrovec
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