Hi,
On 29 Aug 2008, at 08:44, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
[...]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.
In implementations I've looked at, the interfaces really are distinct
hardware but they use a common phy. It's just about transparent to
software.
The NIC driver for the OS *must* have full awareness of
said piggybacking, and if it doesn't, a couple different things can
happen:
a) NIC simply does not work
b) NIC works, but behaves oddly -- usually this is tracked down to
the local network seeing the MAC address continually change for
the IP address associated with the machine
That might just be be misconfiguration: the IPMI interface should have
an IP address distinct from (any address of) the 'proper' interface.
c) NIC works, but IPMI and other features do not work
There are a couple different drivers for FreeBSD which have ASF
knowledge; bge(4) does, and I believe em(4) does (I could be wrong
here).
em(4) does indeed work, we are using it on a couple of dozen boxes.
bge(4) has a loader.conf tunable that tells the driver to
understand ASF or not.
In general, it's horrible, and I feel sorry for driver authors
having to
deal with it.
The only problem I have seen on em is that by default the driver
resets the phy during boot which confuses IPMI; if a SOL console
session is active, the driver is signalled not to do the reset.
--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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