What's wrong with the serial port?

[Shawn Jin]

> When the kernel is booting, it gets to the point where console_init()
> is called, which calls individual early console initialization
> functions. In my case it's serial8250_console_init(). Before
> register_console() is called in serial8250_console_init(), everything
> seems fine because the debugging logs are printed on the serial port.
> But once register_console() is called, the serial port continues
> spitting out à. See the following message. What's wrong?

FYI. The problem was caused by the endianess of io mem access. My
16550-compatible uart port is on a 32-bit bus. The io mem is big
endian. The current serial8250 driver always call read*/write*() to
access uart control registers. These functions are implemented for
little endian access only. So I have to add some awful #ifdef in the
driver to call big endian access functions.

Regards,
-Shawn.