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5. Setting up serial lines and consoles

It is possible to attach UML serial lines and consoles to many types of host I/O channels by specifying them on the command line.

You can attach them to host ptys, ttys, file descriptors, and ports. This allows you to do things like

The general format of the command line option is device=channel.

5.1 Specifying the device

Devices are specified with "con" or "ssl" (console or serial line, respectively), optionally with a device number if you are talking about a specific device.

Using just "con" or "ssl" describes all of the consoles or serial lines. If you want to talk about console #3 or serial line #10, they would be "con3" and "ssl10", respectively.

A specific device name will override a less general "con=" or "ssl=". So, for example, you can assign a pty to each of the serial lines except for the first two like this:

 ssl=pty ssl0=tty:/dev/tty0 ssl1=tty:/dev/tty1
The specificity of the device name is all that matters; order on the command line is irrelevant.

5.2 Specifying the channel

There are a number of different types of channels to attach a UML device to, each with a different way of specifying exactly what to attach to.

You can also specify different input and output channels for a device by putting a comma between them:

 ssl3=tty:/dev/tty2,xterm
will cause serial line 3 to accept input on the host's /dev/tty3 and display output on an xterm. That's a silly example - the most common use of this syntax is to reattach the main console to stdin and stdout as shown above.

If you decide to move the main console away from stdin/stdout, the initial boot output will appear in the terminal that you're running UML in. However, once the console driver has been officially initialized, then the boot output will start appearing wherever you specified that console 0 should be. That device will receive all subsequent output.

5.3 Examples

There are a number of interesting things you can do with this capability.

First, this is how you get rid of those bleeding console xterms by attaching them to host ptys:

 con=pty con0=fd:0,fd:1
This will make a UML console take over an unused host virtual console, so that when you switch to it, you will see the UML login prompt rather than the host login prompt:
 con1=tty:/dev/tty6
You can attach two virtual machines together with what amounts to a serial line as follows:

Run one UML with a serial line attached to a pty -

 ssl1=pty
Look at the boot log to see what pty it got (this example will assume that it got /dev/ptyp1).

Boot the other UML with a serial line attached to the corresponding tty -

 ssl1=tty:/dev/ttyp1
Log in, make sure that it has no getty on that serial line, attach a terminal program like minicom to it, and you should see the login prompt of the other virtual machine.


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