Disable communication over serial port on Beagle board

I have a Beagle board setup (with Angstrom) and ready to run. I need to use the serial port for a custom peripheral I have constructed (and confirmed that the serial from this peripheral works by testing on a desktop computer). Problem is Angstrom (and many of the Beagle board distributions) use the serial port for terminal communications. How to I disable this functionality?

Desktop & server distros tend to have something in /etc/inittab which spawns a getty on most/all serial ports. If your board is a busybox based distro, then it may be done differently.

--- rod.

I have already looked into that. The kernel is holding the serial port for debug messages. Is there a way to release it without having to re-compile u-boot or anything else?

I think there is a 'console' kernel argument potentially passed by the bootloader. This may specify the terminal port to use for the kernel console, and may be alterable either in the bootloader, or by rebuilding the kernel. FWIW, you can see the present kernel commandline with

cat /proc/cmdline

--- rod.