Any way to get a USB-Serial adapter to work at boot time for console redirection?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dave Jones <davej at redhat.com>

| The USB layer initialises really late in the bootstrap, even if
| it's all compiled in rather than modular.  With more and more laptops
| lacking serial ports, it's a shame, as it'd help diagnose a number of
| problems.

My notebook has no serial adapter but it does have a parallel port.
According to
  kernel-2.6.16/linux-2.6.16.x86_64/Documentation/serial-console.txt
I can use lp0 (first parallel port) as the serial console

According to this old message:
  http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0107.3/1142.html
the parallel console is output-only (and this was in 2.4).

Too bad: you may need to enter some commands to do debugging.  Still,
it might be useful.

Would it make sense to leave the conventional keyboard enabled for
console entry when the serial console is output only?

Alternatively, a bidirectional protocol could be supported for the parallel
port.