Re: Getty stopped on rpi3 serial console serial console

On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 04:42:55PM -0700, bob prohaska wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2026 at 02:31:40PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
> > On Aug 18, 2026, at 8:29 AM, bob prohaska <[email protected]> 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.
> > 
> > I have these lines in /boot/loader.conf on pi3:
> > 
> > boot_multicons="YES"
> > boot_serial="YES"
> > 
> Same here:
> # Multiple console (serial+efi gop) enabled.
> boot_multicons="YES"
> boot_serial="YES"
> 
> > See if that helps (though I don't connect anything to
> > the serial line + mine run 15.x). Also check /etc/ttys
> > as others have suggested. You should see a line like
> > 
> > ttyu0   "/usr/libexec/getty 3wire"      vt100   onifconsole secure
> 
> Likewise,
> ttyu0   "/usr/libexec/getty 3wire"      vt100   onifconsole secure
> is in /etc/ttys
> 
> There have been no intentional changes to the system in recent weeks/months,
> the loss of getty on the console happened out of the blue, apparently in the
> last few days. 
> 
> I suspect that rebooting will clear the difficulty, which I'll try in due
> course if nothing else of interest emerges.
> 
> The serial console does still report console messages, for example logging
> in via ssh and using su to become root generates a console output. 

Does 'dmesg' (or /var/run/dmesg.boot) mention console at all?

And, is there a getty process running for ttyu0?

The onifconsole /etc/ttys getty setting leads me to wonder if maybe
the console port hardware wasn't detected for some reason during the
rpi boot, and so no getty was started.

My guess is you're right and a reboot will probably sort it out this
time. It'd be good to figure out why it broke, of course.

But all things being healthy & equal :-) you should also be able to
restart the getty process without reboot, assuming it isn't running.

sr.