Serial problem with MPC8241-based board

[Michael Galassi]

>I've recently acquired an Allnet 6250 NAS, which has an MPC8241-based 
>board. Since its GPL tarball is not available fully, I began to build a 
>toolchain based on gcc-3.4.6 and binutils-2.16.1, and an up-to-date 
>kernel for it. PPCboot states that this is a Sandpoint 8241 Unity board, 
>so the platforms/sandpoint.* was chosen as a starting point, however, 
>after rewriting the irq and ioport values in sandpoint.h to the ones 
>(irq 137, ioport 0x80004500), no output came out of the serial port. 
>After a few days of tweaking around with variables is sandpoint.h, a 
>google session revealed that this board is 99% the same as the Buffalo 
>Linkstation's is, which has a 2.6.x port also, but those kernels are 
>also failing to display any output.
>Can anyone shed some light on what points should I check and what may I 
>have done wrong?

I've recently spent a bunch of time chasing after display issues related
to the goofy way Linux handles consoles early on.  Try removing console=
from your boot arguments and see where that puts you.

-michael