[uClibc] Warning: unable to open an initial console.

Stephan Henningsen sth at amplex.dk
Wed Mar 23 11:57:27 UTC 2005


Hi,

I'm stuck with this message on my ARm system.  After having 
googled a little, I realized this is more or less a classic.  But 
But I still haven't figured out how to make it work.  One thing 
bothers me in particular.

I found out through 
http://lists.arm.linux.org.uk/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2002-June/010034.html
that /dev/console should be:
   crw--w--w-    1 root     tty        5,   1 xxx xx xx:xx console

Then I found buildroots tty group to have guid 5:
sth at speedball:~/buildroot$ grep tty \
	target/default/target_skeleton/etc/group
tty:x:5:

I modified my buildroot/target/default/device_table.txt to 
contains this line (note guid 5 for tty):
	/dev/console c 622 0 5 5 1 - - -


Then I rebuilt root_fs_arm.ext2, mounted it and checked the result:

sth at speedball:~/buildroot$ ll mnt/dev/console
crw--w--w-  1 root root 5, 1 2005-03-23 12:46 mnt/dev/console

And still I find /dev/console hasn't got tty as its guid!  Why is 
that?  Is this ownership what's causing me trouble?



Here are some outputs of interest.  I got desperate and changed 
the permissions on some devices:

sth at speedball:~/buildroot$ grep getty mnt/etc/inittab
# Put a getty on the serial port
#ttyS0::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 vt100
#ttyS1::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 115200 vt100
ttyS0::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS0 115200 vt100
ttyS1::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS1 115200 vt100
ttyS2::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS2 115200 vt100
ttyS3::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS3 115200 vt100
ttyS4::respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyS4 115200 vt100

sth at speedball:~/buildroot$ ll mnt/dev/console mnt/dev/ttyS?
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 5,  1 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/console
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 4, 64 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/ttyS0
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 4, 65 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/ttyS1
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 4, 66 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/ttyS2
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 4, 67 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/ttyS3
crw-rw-rw-  1 root root 4, 68 2005-03-23 12:52 mnt/dev/ttyS4


(durring boot)
...
ttyS0 at MMIO 0xfefc0000 (irq = 6) is a AT91_SERIAL
ttyS1 at MMIO 0xfefc4000 (irq = 7) is a AT91_SERIAL
ttyS2 at MMIO 0xfefc8000 (irq = 8) is a AT91_SERIAL
ttyS3 at MMIO 0xfefcc000 (irq = 9) is a AT91_SERIAL
ttyS4 at MMIO 0xfefff200 (irq = 1) is a AT91_SERIAL
...
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
Freeing initrd memory: 5859K
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Freeing init memory: 52K
Warning: unable to open an initial console.




-- 
Stephan Henningsen



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