Serial Terminal
Why would I need a serial terminal / serial console ?
Note: This apply to qemu/kvm virtualization.
If you do a lot of work over ssh on your pve server you would maybe appreciate to connect to your running VMs like:
qm status 101 status: running
qm terminal 101 starting serial terminal on interface serial0 (press control-O to exit) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Welcome to the Proxmox Virtual Environment. Please use your web browser to ..... ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ pve4 login:
Other use cases:
- you lost network access to the guest and VNC is either too slow for you or don't have the features you need (i.e. easy copy/paste between other terminals)
- your guest freezes or kernel panics, you want to debug it, but it's impossible to capture all messages on VNC screen
- your keyboard layout is borked on the guest
- you are familiar with
xm console <guest>from Xen and you want to use a similar feature here
Some background so you get the idea
When you start Unix/Linux on a PC, the default input device is the attached keyboard (PS/2 or USB), and the default output device is the available VGA /HDMI / Display port of the PC. During the system boot, the kernel send its boot messages, like device detection, to the default output device, and at the end of the boot processes, fires a "login: " prompt on this default output device ( ie your PC display). (Actually it spawns multiple login prompts, you can switch between them with Ctrl-alt-F1, Ctrl-alt-F2, etc ... )
Now it's perfectly fine to send the boot messages and start a login prompt on something else. For instance the Linux Kernel has a netconsole feature, to send the boot messages over the network to another Linux computer. It is also possible to send a copy of the boot messages, and start a login prompt on the serial port of the PC. If you connect to this serial port any computing device with a terminal emulation program, it will be possible to work on the Linux PC as if you were using the PC locally in text mode. The requirements of the terminal emulation are quite low, so you could use HyperTerminal on a Windows PC, Minicom on Linux or even an old Atari ST with the appropriate program.
How do this apply to Proxmox PVE ?
In proxmox things work exactly same, but with emulated devices. NoVNC/ VNC Applet connects to your VM keyboard and VM VGA display and displays the stuff you would expect from a real PC on a vga display with a locally attached keyboard. Now we can also configure our VM to have an emulated serial port, and instruct the OS, to send a copy of the boot messages /start a login prompt on the emulated serial port. Once this is configured it will be possible to connect from the host (ie the server running pve) using a terminal emulation program, which is handily builtin in the Proxmox Qemu Manager.
Configuration on the host
Add a virtual serial port to the VM
# open /etc/pve/qemu-server/101.conf and add the following parameter at the end of file serial0: socket
Configuration on the guest
Reboot the VM, verify that the emulated serial port is there
dmesg | grep ttyS [ 0.457814] 00:0a: ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
Instruct grub2 to send the boot messages on the VGA display and on the serial port
# in /etc/default/grub change the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT parameter to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet console=tty0 console=ttyS0,38400n8"
and run
update-grub
Instruct the init system (here systemd) to start a login promt on the serial port
systemctl start serial-getty@ttyS0.service systemctl enable serial-getty@ttyS0.service
Connecting to the Serial Terminal
On the Host, just enter
qm terminal <VMiD>
and enter enter a second time you should get a login prompt
Trouble shooting
You can check that the virtual serial port is present, and properly bound to the unix socket that qm terminal uses with:
qm monitor <VMiD> info chardev
which should contains a line starting with serial0 like:
serial0: filename=disconnected:unix:/var/run/qemu-server/101.serial0,server