Comment 3 for bug 1770962

The problem on a generic modular platform like x86 is we have no safe way to determine what is wired to ttyS0 and just starting a getty there can do wonderfully weird things to other serial devices that might be hanging off it.

Maybe for a server-only installer in the modern world where modems are rare and who has a fingerprint scanner on a server anyway, the risk is a sensible trade-off to get it right "most of the time", but I dunno. Other installer codebases (like d-i) that chose not to automatically do this on x86 certainly hail from a time when lots of random serial devices were a lot more common.

Now, above discussion aside, there is a devicetree node used for this in OpenFirmware (which is always correct), and there is meant to be a way in ACPI to tag an actual serial console chosen from EFI/BIOS. As far as I know, the ACPI one is much less reliably used than the OF one, but maybe we can still figure out how to poke it and use it when it is.