Emergency console access

All Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) images come with a default configuration for the console which is meant to accommodate most virtualized and bare-metal setups.

However, it may not always match your specific hardware configuration. In that case, you can tweak the console setup by adjusting kernel parameters.

You can specify multiple console= options on the kernel command line. Kernel messages will appear on all of them, however only the last-specified device will be used as the foreground interactive console (i.e. /dev/console) for the machine.

You can remove either console entries in order to match your machine setup, or even remove both and rely on kernel auto-detection (which however may not work for all cases).

In order to temporarily change console configuration, it is enough to change kernel arguments in the bootloader for a single boot.

When the GRUB menu shows up initially, press 'e' to edit the current boot entry. Adjust the console parameters from the kernel line as described above, then press 'Ctrl-x' to resume booting.

If you are installing FCOS via coreos-installer on a machine which requires custom console configuration, you can permanently configure that directly at install time.

In the example above, the trailing --delete-karg 'console=ttyS0,115200n8' will remove the serial console entry from the boot parameters of the installed system.

If you have an existing FCOS node with a mismatched console configuration, you can permanently adjust that via rpm-ostree.

In the example above, rpm-ostree will create a new deployment without the serial console entry, and the machine will reboot into it.