I've been dealing so much on OS testing purpose. And sometimes i need to simulate a "LFS" like OS where all output is configured to go trough serial device all of them. So even we are succeed to boot the OS we will not see any output on the VMWARE/VMPLAYER screen.

Ok when dealing with VMWARE/VMPLAYER so how to make an easy way to route all those serial message to our internal file, so we could just do "tail -f <serial_simulate_file>" to see the output ?. This article will explain briefly how to do this.

Execution

First you need this OS already succeed to boot on your VM* box. Then you should install socat (Multipurpose relay (SOcket CAT)), you can find it here. In case you are using Debian Box you can do this way.

apt-get install socat

Then you can edit you OS VM* configuration. Mostly you see this file with extension *.vmx. Edit this file to have some entry like this.

...
serial0.present = "TRUE"
serial0.fileType = "pipe"
serial0.fileName = "./serial1"
serial0.pipe.endPoint = "server"
serial0.hardwareFlowControl = "TRUE"
...

Ok, now you have ask the VM* to use file "./serial1" as the serial device, but you still can not just read plainly this file to get the output. You need socat program to rerouting all stuff. You can do this way.

socat ./serial1 <stdio | tcp4-listen:<port>>

Here you have some option, acting "./serial1" as stdio or opening a port so you could telnet to those port, some other option you could just read the manpage of socat, but those one should be enough.

Now you could see the serial output of you VM* box OS.

This way i take when i had some experience to simulate Ericsson TSP 5 Platform in my own laptop. Sure i need to play around how the platform is working, but i want them in my laptop. Creating 3 machine in my own laptop. 1 acting as IO processor, 1 acting as traffic processor running DICOS OS, and 1 acting as traffic processor running LINUX OS. I use TADE (TSP Application Development Environment, now it's called TSP DL) with MAIA as simulator generator (previously called VEGA).

- d