Console mangled on Intel Atom E3845

J

Jake Roberts

Good morning. I have purchased a Roqos router, which has an Intel Atom E3845. It came preinstalled with Debian plus the vendor's secret sauce. When I boot any OS to the console it is so mangled that it's unreadable. This applies to FreeBSD 11, and 12, TrueOS, Debian, and Ubuntu. I've dug around in the UEFI and it seems that the console output is set to pciANSI. Is there a way to fix this at the command line?
 

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VGA. The monthly subscription is for cloud stuff they are doing on some mangled version of Debian I don't care about. It radiates almost no heat, and draws around 10 watts. Freebsd installs OK, but the console issue makes it difficult to muck around with.
 
I found better pictures and see it has HDMI output. Have you tried to SSH in to see what that looks like?
Are you booting off an mSATA module? How did you get it setup with it looking so poor? Did the FreeBSD installer video output look different?
 
SSH looks fine. m.2 sata module. Did the setup with trial and error plus muscle memory. The boot loader menu looks fine. As soon as the system begins booting the screen switches to what you see in the picture. Debian, once installed looks fine. X running on TrueOS looks fine.
 
Was knocking the idea of recompiling coreboot with Seabios. It uses Tianocore now. Does anyone know if this would make a difference?
 
If Beastie comes up OK and it goes wonky after that then you need to investigate syscons. The newer vt(4) does act weirdly on some platforms.
 
Is your unit different than the pictures from above? I see 4 Gigabit ethernet and one marked Internet. Also I do not see an M.2 slot.
The unit from the CNX site looks pretty awesome to me for an $225 rig. Quad core and low power.
I see an 2x4pin header and wonder if its SPI.
 
Sorry it's taken to long to respond. It is an mSata drive. I never knew the difference before now. My solution was to buy a TTL to USB cable and just use the serial console. This gets it done for me, probably better than VGA anyway since I don't have a monitor to spare. Thanks everybody for the help.
 
What is the situation with ethernet interfaces? All Intel? 4 Gigabit and one 10/100 for Internet?

So you would attribute your trouble to the HDMI output? Were you using a 1080p LCD as 720p sometimes act up I have found.

Did you find good docs for the rx/tx/gnd pins for uart console?
 
Two Intel I211 NICs. igb0 for wan, igb1 for all 4 lan ports. Screen is my ancient Samsung SyncMaster, 1680 x 1024. The TTL adapter I bought came with a single plug. I used my volt meter to sort out the pins on the board.
 
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