Re: Getty stopped on rpi3 serial console serial console

On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 08:29:46AM -0700, bob prohaska wrote:
> I just noticed that an RPi3 running 
> FreeBSD ns2.zefox.net 14.4-RELEASE-p6 FreeBSD 14.4-RELEASE-p6 GENERIC arm64 aarch64 1404000 1404000
> has stopped putting a login prompt on the serial console.
> 
> Ssh logins work normally, there are no other visible anomalies,
> uptime reports  8:25AM  up 56 days, 17:22, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
> 
> For immediate purposes this is harmless, but might it be indicative of some
> deeper problem? It's a binary-only installation maintained using freebsd-update.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and any insights.

Obvious question: is there actually a 'getty' process running for that port?

Since it worked previously, I imagine your config at least started out OK;
what do these sorts of files look like:

/boot.config
/boot/device.hints
/boot/loader.conf
/boot/loader.conf.local

Disclaimer: I haven't run FreeBSD on ARM since circa 14.0 and then on rpi4b
rather than rpi3 like yours, so YMMV. I'm not sure what the serial console
config should be nowdays.

Probably unrelated: I often ran into a problem with "garbage" characters
displayed on the serial line for console, which would interrupt the auto
boot sequence and leave my system at loader prompt. It booted normally
when I told it to proceed from there.

Troubleshooting eliminated the serial cables and console server stuff as
culprits, as they worked fine with amd64 FreeBSD (et al) systems, and I
could reproduce the problem with other cables, connectors, and console
server ports. I eventually gave up and used the rpi4 for other things.

sr.