NIC on HP Bl460c G1 Blade not available

B

bkormann

Hello.

I have installed a FreeBSD 7.2 on our HP Bl460c G1 Blade system with two Xeon processors and 32 GB RAM. This blade comes with two embedded network controllers and in our case an additionally attached Mezzanine card for two more network controllers. Right after the first boot (GENERIC KERNEL) only the embedded network interfaces get properly configured for use. The additional Broadcom NetXtreme II family NICs of the Mezzanine card (HP NC382m DP 1GbE Multifunction BL-c Adapter) are correctly identified by the bce-driver, but lead to the following kernel debug output:

No PHY found on child MII bus

So the NICs are bound to a logical network card identifier like bce1, but they never become ready to be configured via ifconfig.

On our other identically configured blades we run a Linux distribution, where these two additional NICs are also properly identified. But the kernel outputs a request for the firmware file. Since we provide the firmware to the kernel the additional NICs become available.

My questions:
------------

Why does the FreeBSD kernel output "No PHY found on child MII bus"?
Is some relevant data like the firmware missing?
Is this behavior known or supposed to be a bug?
--> How can this issue be solved?
 
bkormann said:
Why does the FreeBSD kernel output "No PHY found on child MII bus"?
Is some relevant data like the firmware missing?
Is this behavior known or supposed to be a bug?
--> How can this issue be solved?
Click to expand...

Here's the block of code that's related:
/usr/src/sys/dev/bce/if_bce.c
Code: 
        /* Check for an MII child bus by probing the PHY. */
        if (mii_phy_probe(dev, &sc->bce_miibus, bce_ifmedia_upd,
                bce_ifmedia_sts)) {
                BCE_PRINTF("%s(%d): No PHY found on child MII bus!\n",
                        __FILE__, __LINE__);
                rc = ENXIO;
                goto bce_attach_fail;
        }

Unfortunately, I don't know what it means. Perhaps someone else will be able to clarify this.

The Hardware Notes and bce() shows that the HP NC382m DP 1GbE Multifunction BL-c Adapter is supported though.
 
Network configurations fails on freebsd 8

Nothing has changed in FreeBSD 8. In the configurations menu of the installation procedure there are only the embedded NICS available.
The problem doesn't seem to be solved in version 8.
 
Seems to be a BSD issue

I tried other BSD distributions and none of it was able to configure the Mezzanine card properly. On the other hand a knoppix live cd and an OpenSolaris 10 live cd identified and configured the cards correctly.

Is there a way to disable the probing or configure the kernel / network submodule for a more precise debug output? Since the FreeBSD driver BCE supports the cards a solution must be found.

Thank you very much for your support.
 
Several ways for more debug output exists, for example a verbose boot.
As always, providing more info wlll increase the chance that anyone will be able to help you. In your case, provide the relevant lines from # pciconf -lv output.
 
detailed output

The dmesg.txt file contains the grep on the bce1 network card.

A partial output of pciconf -lv is also attached in pciconf.txt. Can anyone provide me with more information on how to get rid of this phenomenon?
The current installation is FreeBSD 8. Thank you very much.
 

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