bce and "Warning: bootcode thinks driver is absent."

[Larry Baird]

Sean,

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 10:20:35AM -0700, Sean Bruno wrote:
> On Wed, 2013-07-17 at 11:55 -0400, Larry Baird wrote:
> > Recently under amd64 and 9.1-STABLE I am seeing issues with the bce
> > driver.  Message is "Warning: bootcode thinks driver is absent".  After
> > this message, the box appears to be wedged.  After rebooting, it got the
> > same message during fsck.  So we installed 9.2 pre-release using a snapshot
> > iso from 7/13/13.  Shortly after boot we got the same message.  We are now in
> > the process of installing 9.1 release to verify this is a driver issue and
> > not hardware flaking out.  Anybody else seen this issue?
> 
> Hey, looks like we might be seeing similar things.  I've been
> investigating the fact that FreeBSD appears to be smashing the mangement
> firmware because of the ipmi(4) code attempting to attach to the ACPI
> and ISA versions of the BMC.  
> 
> Do you see attempts to attach to "ipmi1" and do you see various cases
> where you get a "NMI" of some kind on an ifconfig up of your network
> interfaces?
My issues with the bce(4) seem to have been a non-issue.  I still see
"bce0: bce_pulse(): Warning: bootcode thinks driver is absent! (bc_state =
0x00000006)" when booting, but the boxes themselves no longer seem to have 
an issue.  Looking through recent mods to the bce driver I think I
was barking up the wrong tree. All of the recent changes seem beneign.  
Something else in the stable tree was causing my system deadlocks.  Current
stable seems to be running without an issue for me.

Larry

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Larry Baird
Global Technology Associates, Inc. 1992-2012 	| http://www.gta.com
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