bce(4) with IPMI

[Miroslav Lachman]

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