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Faster_Agda
Contributor
Contributor

VM to VM serial communication - can it be done?

I have a couple of Ubuntus (6.10, 64-bit) and I'd like to connect them through their serial ports. The most sensible looking thing I've tried today is attaching them both to the same named pipe on my Windows host, marking one as the server and the other as the client.

And it almost works.

The main problem is that if I do

cat >/dev/ttyS0

Rutger Hauer

then doing

cat /dev/ttyS0 >incoming

reveals that I've received "Rutger Hauer" followed by 5578 bytes consisting of seemingly randomly chosen 0x0a and 0x07 bytes.

I realize that this may possibly be an error in my handling of the serial ports within linux, but then again it might not. There really isn't much information about serial ports in the manual either. What is for instance really the difference between the other end is "another virtual machine" and "an application" options?

I've tried this on Workstation 5.5 and the latest version 6 beta.

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KevinG
Immortal
Immortal

You can make a direct connection between two virtual machines or between a virtual machine and an application running on the host computer

More details can be found here

http://www.vmware.com/support/ws55/doc/ws_devices_serial.html

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Faster_Agda
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah. Unfortunately for me that's exactly what I did as I wrote above. I'm guessing that the problem is unrelated to VMware, since I could use getty/picocom to login from one machine to the other.

I'm still getting errors though, trying to use gdb/gdbserver to debug a program, but again, it's probably most likely unrelated to VMware so I'll take my questions elsewhere.

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