grub-0.97-r7 does not respect the timeout setting in certain situations and will sit waiting for user to select the entry to boot. See attached config that triggers this issue. Reproducible: Always
Created attachment 196030 [details] grub.conf that sits there and waits for input from user
(In reply to comment #0) > grub-0.97-r7 does not respect the timeout setting in certain situations and > will sit waiting for user to select the entry to boot. See attached config that > triggers this issue. > > Reproducible: Always > I'm guessing your configuration is borked. Near as I can tell it looks incomplete. See: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/configure-boot-loader-grub.html
"terminal serial", when added to the config after the serial line, results in the menu not displaying at all over the serial line, and user input not triggering booting. It does seem to timeout after 5 minutes and start, at least it did last time :) So with a so-called "valid" configuration, it gets even worse :/
I haven't had a chance to dig up an extra serial cable otherwise I'd try it. Here's another lot to examine: https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/2421 I'd imagine it's some esoteric issue that ought to be resolvable via an appropriate configuration choice. Given how many systems run headless, I have a hard time imagining it as a Grub bug (not to say it's not--that's possible, especially with new hardware).
For the original topic of this bug, the issue may be caused by spurious characters entering the input buffer of the keyboard in the serial over IP solution I'm using (built into my hardware.) This may be causing the grub countdown to abort. However, I have also encountered other weird serial configuration issues with grub, such as the one mentioned in comment #4. I do think that grub needs some serious testing (and fixing) when it comes to serial, but the original topic of this bug may be caused by hardware rather than software. Might be a good idea to recommend using lilo in the install docs if you are interested in serial support.
From your original grub.conf, infra has several machines with those exact settings, and zero issues with -r9 (I'd know if we did, 30+ machines with -r9 right now). Beyond that, I have seen brain-damaged "integrated" serial consoles that send spurious characters close to the boot time. What's the actual hardware, and the client app for the Serial-over-IP?
oh, also, there was a debug option to make grub print out exactly what it recieved, if you want to dig up that, you can probably trace what was sent.
Robin, this issue was indeed caused by spurious characters over IP over serial. A firmware update fixed the issue. There were no overt signs of spurious characters other than the grub timeout aborting automatically, which made it hard to figure out. I am marking this bug as invalid.
