bge IPMI patch final review

[Julian Elischer]

Doug Ambrisko wrote:

>Julian Elischer writes:
>| Doug Ambrisko wrote:
>| 
>| >I'd like to commit my final bge version of the IPMI patch to keep IPMI
>| >working when FreeBSD attaches and also when the NIC is downed.
>| >I also have patches for the bce to do the same that I sent to David.
>| >This has various reviews and testing in the wild.  I want to give
>| >a heads up since there have been changes in the bge driver recently.
>| >I'd like to not hold off on this anymore.
>| 
>| code looks good but could you add a bunch of comments explaining the 
>| handshake and how this works. (be verbose please)
>
>You tell me and we'll both know :-(  It's inspired from Linux and
>that doesn't explain it.  Their doc. doesn't say much except do this 
>then don't touch the PHY which is what Linux does.  Via emperical 
>evidence I found that if I was careful I could talk to the PHY initially.
>Now if you want a more interesting thing to look at then try the bce version.
>There is absolutely no doc's.  that I could find.
>
>  
>
you still know more about it than anyone else..  at least comment your 
assumptions
so that others that follow have a change to build on what you have done.

>About the only thing I can say is that we have to play with is the
>BGE_MODECTL_STACKUP that says the OS driver is running.  I could mention 
>that.
>  
>

well that could be documented.

>If we really had insight into a potential firmware handshake then we could 
>try to co-operate and access the PHY in a safe way to watch link state
>changes.  Via emperical means I could not figure anything out :-(  It's
>even worse that we can't tell if IPMI was actually enabled or not since
>some implementations required a reset before talking to the chip
>to see what it was doing :-(  I don't see any clues in the kernel.org
>or BroadCom's driver.
>
>Currently it does more then what Linux and Solaris do :-)
>  
>

so the comments could at least say what you think is going on (and all 
that you have said above)
so that others can understand more.

> 
>Doug A.
>  
>