Avanti supports two serial ports. The OPA0/tty00 – TTA0/tty01 tabs provide the means to define each port. A drop-down box allows the user to define a virtual serial port via Telnet server, connect it to a physical serial port via Physical port, or capture serial-printer output via Print to File. The ports will appear as OPA0 and TTA0 on OpenVMS systems and tty00 and tty01 on Tru64 UNIX systems.
In a hand-edited configuration file, these two base ports must be named exactly serial0 and serial1, and each name may occur at most once under the PCI-bus definition. A port omitted from the file still exists as an idle onboard UART, but has no host-side connection. Avanti rejects an empty, signed, malformed, overflowing, duplicate, or above-limit base-port identifier before startup. When updating an older hand-edited file, remove duplicate definitions and rename any retained base ports to serial0 or serial1. The separately documented five-port ISA cards continue to use their own serial0 through serial4 children.
Tip:Migration Specialties recommends enabling both virtual serial ports when building, modifying, or troubleshooting an Avanti configuration. Having two serial access points to a virtual Alpha system is useful in case one session locks up or network problems block standard telnet access.
Note:Match the baud rate and other communication settings at both ends. Historical reports associated mismatched settings with an apparently hung port, but that exact failure signature was not reproduced in the Avanti 5.1.0 validation.
Log File
Checking the Log file box enables serial port logging. Data appearing on the serial port will also be written to an ASCII log file. By default, the log file name is <base>_VirtualAlphaName_serial#.log.
VirtualAlphaName: The name of the virtual Alpha definition as it appears on the definition tab.
serial#: serial0 or serial1, depending upon the serial port being logged.
Note:Caution should be used when logging serial port activity. A heavily used port will produce a large log file, which may impact disk resources on the host system.
Keep
By default, Avanti retains six serial log files. If a serial log file is present when Avanti is launched, it is renamed <base>_VirtualAlphaName_serial#.log;-1. On a subsequent Avanti launch, it would become <base>_VirtualAlphaName_serial#.log;-2, and so on. The user can increase or decrease the number of serial log files retained using the keep field.
