bce(4) with IPMI

[Sean Bruno]

On Thu, 2011-09-29 at 11:27 -0700, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> Sean Bruno wrote:
> > We've been getting reports of odd behavior on our Dell R410 machines
> > when trying to use IPMI.  The servers have two NIC's that we have
> > assigned as the IPMI interface(bce0) and production interface(bce1)
> > respectively.
> >
> > Since we don't actually configure bce0 in FreeBSD, we've found that the
> > IPMI interface deactivated when bce(4) loads.  I assume that the driver
> > is not initializing the interface correctly in this case and the default
> > case is to turn the interface off.  Does it make sense to completely
> > turn off the interface when there is an active link on the port, but no
> > configuration assigned?
> 
> I had similar problem few years ago with bge interface. There is 
> following loader tunable option for it:
> 
>   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.
> 
> Is it possible that something similar is needed for bce too?
> 
> Miroslav Lachman

Maybe.  But from the changelogs of bce(4), it looks like the
deactivation of the interface when not configured is pretty much
intentional.

Sean