debugging Xen in a serial-less environment

[Christian Tramnitz <chris.ace@gmx.net>]

I'm currently trying to debug a couple of iommu issues I'm experiencing
on a X58 board with VT-d while passing through hardware into a Windows
HVM domU, but unfortunately it seems legacy hardware was deemed obsolete
and not a single serial port is provided by the board (Asus P6T Deluxe
for that matter).

Are there any alternatives to the Xen console on serial or vga?

I've got netconsole working for dom0 just to realize that Xen brings its
own console drivers...
So usbserial won't work and even PCI-based RS232 might not work (as seen
here: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.emulators.xen.devel/53631 )

What are the long-term plans anyway for the console? I think we'll see
onboard serial disappearing more often while usb is no alternative at
all (nobody would want to have it's USB bus owned by the hypervisor
instead of a dom). The same goes for networking, so are there any
options at all?
I've seen an implementation of a syslog relay (xenlogd?) back in 2006,
but having the dom0 handle the events doesn't really help if the
hypervisor crashes, does it?


Best regards,
   Christian