Disable probing of bge1?

[Tom Evans]

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 12:26 PM, Patrick M. Hausen <hausen at punkt.de> wrote:
> Hi, all,
>
> I just discovered a minor problem when updating some rather dated
> systems from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.x or 8.x.
>
> The servers are Fujitsu Technology Solutions (former Fujitsu-Siemens)
> RX100 S4. The current generation of the same system is RX100 S6, so this
> is two generations old. Some of them still run fine in our datacenter, though.
>
> While the S5 and S6 series features two gigabit ports and an additional
> network interface for out of band management (called iRMC, similar to HP's iLO),
> the S4 has only two gigabit ports and the iRMC interface is piggybacked to
> one of them.
>
> In our standard setup we disable the first interface in the BIOS. If you do this,
> the physical port is available as a dedicated management interface to the iRMC
> and only the second IF is probed by FreeBSD 6.x as bge0.
>
> Now I try to PXE boot an identically configured system via the remote serial
> console with FreeBSD 7. Everything runs fine, until the kernel probes the
> network interfaces. The last thing I see are messages about successful
> probing of both bge0 and bge1 and then my remote management connection
> and my console are gone.
>
> I have to reset the BMC by literally pulling the power to get the iRMC back.
>
> Is it possible to use some device.hints entry to prohibit the probing of bge1?
> I think that would be the easiest solution to the problem? Other suggestions
> are of course welcome. I can provide more config details and dmesg output
> if needed.
>
> Thanks,
> Patrick

Maybe this loader tunable will help:
     hw.bge.allow_asf
         Allow the ASF feature for cooperating with IPMI.  Can cause sys‐
         tem lockup problems on a small number of systems.  Disabled by
         default.

Cheers

Tom