The new Raspberry Pi 3 released on 29 Feb 2016 has issues with its UART port as the pinout GPIO 14/15 on the pin header is now based on a low throughput mini-UART.
To understand the issue better than reading the wall of text below, you can see the talk I gave on this issue.
The actual hardware UART on the BCM2837 SoC has now been assigned to handle Bluetooth with the BCM43438 Wifi/Bluetooth chip. More details can be found here and here.
This mini-UART does not produce a stable baud rate as it fluctuates based on the Core clock speed whenever it rises or falls. The result is that the serial debug output is practically unusable. On Raspbian you may see garbage or nothing at all. The solution is simple, add core_freq=250
to /boot/config.txt
to cap the core frequency to a constant value. This optio