IPMI and Dell ERA/O

[Jonathan Bond-Caron]

On Fri Aug 29 03:44 AM, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 02:17:17AM -0400, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
>> Curiously, IPMI shares the ethernet ports with the onboard ethernet 
>> controllers without FreeBSD's knowledge.  It does use a different MAC 
>> address.  It is also apparently capable of using vlans (haven't 
>> tested this yet).  I'm most nervous about how this might behave if 
>> the port was being nailed with traffic --- but I can't easily test 
>> this to my satisfaction. What controls the contention for the port 
>> between whatever IPMI magic is going on and the OS use of the port?
> 
> That said, the feature you're referring to (IPMI piggybacking on top 
> of an existing NIC on the mainboard) is called "ASF" from a NIC driver 
> perspective.  The NIC driver for the OS *must* have full awareness of 
> said piggybacking, and if it doesn't, a couple different things can
> happen:
> 

Thanks for the info, the "ASF" functionality seems to be what Dell uses with
the ERA/O, DRAC etc.. cards, 
http://www.dmtf.org/standards/documents/ASF/DSP0114.pdf (picture on page 6
says it all)

Although I fixed my problem with:
vi /boot/device.hints
hint.ipmi.0.at=isa0
hint.ipmi.0.mode=KCS

I'm curious about 
hw.bge.allow_asf=1
hw.bge.allow_asf=0

It doesn't seem to have any effect on a Dell 1750, any details on how it can
affect IPMI, or point me to the discussions
I'd like to keep http://www.freebsdwiki.net/index.php/IPMI

with as much accurate information as possible