Hi all,
Current snapshots of Debian Jessie installer snapshots, as well as the kernel packages, support providing the system console information via the chosen node 'stdout-path' property instead of on the command line.
This is enabled by two patches backported from 3.17 to Jessie's 3.16 kernel, together with three small patches currently in Linus's tree, awaiting 3.19-rc1.
The first two are actually sufficient for models, but the additional ones are required to be able to specify options (like baudrate).
The commits are:
From 3.16
a208ffd251d08ed7ba6bdf3ae1e423373fb12d3d - of: Enable console on serial ports specified by /chosen/stdout-path 3482f2c52b77bf6596e24aae82e204a0603eba66 - of: Create of_console_check() for selecting a console specified in /chosen
From current Linus
2a9d832cc9aae21ea827520fef635b6c49a06c6d - of: Add bindings for chosen node, stdout-path 75c28c09af99a0db0ccd8b4395469761aa736543 - of: add optional options parameter to of_find_node_by_path() 7914a7c5651a51617d952e8fa745000ed8c4f001 - of: support passing console options with stdout-path
Linaro 2014.12 UEFI release sets this option for FVP/Foundation Base models.
QEMU 2.2 does the same for all (?) arm64 platforms.
ACPI platforms will be able to do something similar with SPCR.
/ Leif