Console access from startup

  • From experiencing the situation first hand. It would be awesome if when, or before, the kodi screen pops up we could press/hold F4 or something to go into console mode.

    I have new hardware that the current versions were not supporting the NIC. As such I couldn't SSH into the system to install the drivers.

    If there was a way to bring up a console locally that would allow us to do some under the hood work in these kinds of situations.

    If there already is a way to do something like above please correct me.

  • You can add "textmode" to kernel boot params to boot to a console. It's not interactive, but then even if you have a console you will not be able to add drivers due to how LE is packaged (the OS is uncompressed into RAM from a read-only file on each boot). In the past CTRL+ALT+F3 was supported on x86_64 hardware (can alse be enabled with "debugging" in boot params) but this was removed to improve security and because nobody used it, and there is no equivalent on ARM SoC devices.

  • You can get a debug shell by adding systemd.debug_shell to the kernel command line (syslinux.cfg on x86, cmdline.txt on RPi etc).

    On x86 this will give you a shell on the ALT-F3 console, on RPi, RK etc it defaults to (serial) consoles.

    In nightly master builds you can change the tty for the debug shell with eg systemd.debug_shell=/dev/ttyS0 (this is not available in LE 9.2 as it uses an older systemd version).

    so long,

    Hias