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List:       opensolaris-driver-discuss
Subject:    [driver-discuss] IBM BladeCenter BMC and Serial over LAN issues?
From:       Kyle McDonald <KMcDonald () Egenera ! COM>
Date:       2008-09-25 21:11:29
Message-ID: 48DBFE81.8000807 () Egenera ! COM
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Hi all,

I have an IBM BladeCenter with several HS20 blades. Each of these has a 
BMC module and one of the ways to use the console of the blade is to 
redirect the console to the blade's serial port which the BMC module 
then translates to SOL protocol, which you can access through the network.

I am having a problem (on sNV97 and sNV98) maintaining the console 
access this way when running Solaris on these blades (I am going to test 
linux next.) The SOL console works great through POST, all the BIOS 
menus, grub, and even the initial Kernel startup. But as soon as the 
Solaris kernel boots (banner appears) and the message about configuring 
/dev comes up, something in Solaris causes the BMC to drop the SOL 
connection and refuses to restart it (reports 'SOL not ready'.) As soon 
as the blade is rebooted and POST starts it starts working again.


There is one known similar problem. Since the network connection to the 
BMC is shared with the first ethernet port on the blade, it is known 
that PXE/DHCP booting the blade using the first ethernet interface, 
resets the NIC and will cause the active SOL console session to be 
disconnected just like what I'm describing above.

This isn't my problem (I'm not PXE/DHCP booting, and when I do I use the 
second ethernet not the first,) but it sounds very similar. So I'm 
wondering 2 things:

1.) Could the Broadcom ethernet driver be 'reseting' the first NIC 
exactly the same way the PXE/DHCP boot would, and therefore be 
triggering the same issue?

2.) I seem to recall a recent integration or change involving a Solaris 
driver to interact with the BMC module. Could that or something else in 
the kernel be resetting the BMC directly, or otherwise causing the SOL 
connection to drop?

I need to go back and test earlier sNV builds and s10 (which IBM claims 
works fine) but I thought I'd ask here first.

  -Kyle



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