Console serial output: what am I missing?

When booting Linux on my custom 860-based board, I get stuck in
serial_console_write where BD_SC_READY never goes low,
on the second iteration of the loop, first time the function is called.
It seems obvious that I haven't set everything up right:  the first
character is always pending and never finishes.  Can anyone loan me a clue
as to what might be missing?  I have set the board information including
bi_intfreq (50) and bi_baudrate (9600), and these values indeed are used by
m8xx_cpm_setbrg.  The uart.c is configured to use SMC1 as the console.
--
Dave Brown [off-list ref]

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