Broadcom tg3 and ASF for VLAN tagged traffic

[Bertho Stultiens]

Hello all,

I have a stack of DL360G4(p) with BCM5704 interfaces and Debian Sarge/Xen installed. The problem I am experiencing is the lack of propagation of 802.1q tagged packets onto the xen bridge.

After a couple of days searching I've tracked the problem down to the existence of ASF (Alert Standard Format), reading through the tg3 driver source, mailing lists and Broadcom's utilities. ASF is enabled for the primary interface but not for the secondary (according to kernel output at the time of tg3 initialization). If ASF is enabled, the network card will always untag all dot1q tags from incoming packets, which is enforced by the driver, and that is fatal when you expect the tagged packets to arrive over a bridge.

In depth information on ASF is very hard to come by and is only very sparsely described here and there. A mail from a mailing list suggest to disable ASF (using the Broadcom DOS utility disk with b57udiag).

Now for the questions:
- is there any good documentaion for ASF from HP or others?
- why is ASF enabled by default on the DL360 (and possibly other systems) and why only on one interface?
- is there any possibility to disable this from within Linux (i.e. writing the netcard's NVRAM; ethtool does not support such thing (yet))?
- is it possible to disable ASF in the BIOS?

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Greetings Bertho

[michael chan_4]

Yes, the existence of management firmware (ASF) does require VLAN stripping. That's unfortunately a limitation on our chips and firmware.

I suggest that you submit a support request at the link below to request Linux tools that can display and configure the managment firmware. The linux driver does not distinguish between the different types of management firmware and uses ASF generically to mean all managment fw.

http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/supportrequest.php

[Bertho Stultiens]

I've been trying through HP support to get ASF disabled (apparently aka IPMI). So far I've updated the firmware once and tried both Broadcom's utility and HP's ({b75udiag,q57diag} -c 0 -asf 0). Both returned the same error "Error: ASF firmware cannot be located in NVRAM".

The latest firmware CD from HP (7.90) does not run properly and crashes with a bus error in bootar. Currently, there is a possibility to update the firmware once more manually and hope that works, but I'm slightly pessimistic at the moment.

So, you might be right that I need to get Broadcom involved, but I would like HP to do that, as they have supplied the hardware (the ethernet controller is rebranded by HP) and there should be 24/7 service on the machine.

Anyhow, this little config setup turns out to be a nightmare. I'd rather have the cards default configured to be functional ethernet controllers where you intentionally have to enable ASF. I also checked some older DL360 machines in my stack of various age and they all have ASF enabled (and all need to get rid of this config in the near future).

So, having the problem and possible solution documented on the forum should help others in the future when they run into this problem. Input is welcome from anyone who has worked on this. I'll keep posting progress til there is a fix.

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Greetings Bertho

[Nasser Iranikhah · Accepted solution]

Please follow these procedure to disable ASF firmware on any NetXtreme devices.

Please fetch the user diagnostic application from our website and follow these instructions:
1) Burn a CD using this ISO image
2) boot to DOS using this CD
3) cd to b57diag and run "b57udaig -cmd"
4) At the prompt enter "setipmi -d @"

[Bertho Stultiens]

This fixes the problem. Thanks!

The trick is:
"setipmi -d @"

That was something HP support didn't tell me.

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Greetings Bertho

[Bertho Stultiens]

Setipmi command fixes the problem.