UART

With tpi it's possible to read and write data to/from nodes over serial, effectively emulating a (rather inefficient) TTY session. However, there are two things to be aware of:

• UART is disabled by default in Raspberry Pi OS,
• The non-interactive usage with the tpi command can be performed interactively with picocom which comes pre-installed on the BMC.

Enabling UART in Raspberry Pi OS

Serial functionality is controlled in Raspberry Pi OS by a value enable_uart in OS configuration file called /boot/config.txt. There are several ways to toggle it:

• Using raspi-config:
  • After you log in to your node, execute sudo raspi-config;
  • Navigate to "3 Interface Options";
  • Enable "I6 Serial Port".
• Manually:
  • After you log in, edit the config file sudo vi /boot/config.txt;
  • Add enable_uart=1 under [all].
• Without logging in:
  • Mount the device's boot partition in your BMC (see Accessing nodes's filesystems)
  • Edit config.txt and add enable_uart=1 under [all].
  • Unmount partition.

Changes take effect after restart.

Using picocom

• Log in to your BMC, e.g. ssh [email protected]
• Determine the serial pseudo-device of the node
  • Node 1: /dev/ttyS2
  • Node 2: /dev/ttyS1
  • Node 3: /dev/ttyS4
  • Node 4: /dev/ttyS5
• Execute command with an appropriate device path:
  picocom /dev/ttyS2 -b 115200
• Turn the node on and after several seconds you will see the Linux boot log. You may now log in and execute any commands of your choice.

Using tpi

Reading and writing over serial can be accomplished with commands tpi uart get and tpi uart set respectively. The former performs reading of stored data:

$ tpi uart --node 1 get
[    0.008458] CPU1: Booted secondary processor 0x0000000001 [0x410fd083]
[..]
[    5.610444] systemd[1]: Started Journal Service.
Debian GNU/Linux 11 raspberrypi ttyS0
raspberrypi login:

And the latter writes data, effectively executing a command:

$ tpi uart --node 1 set --cmd 'username'
$ tpi uart --node 1 set --cmd 'password'
$ tpi uart --node 1 get
[..]
Linux raspberrypi 5.15.84-v8+ #1613 SMP PREEMPT [..]
$ tpi uart --node 1 set --cmd 'echo hi'
$ tpi uart --node 1 get
echo hi
hi