[E1000-devel] Which Intel GE chipsets support a dedicated MAC for IPMI

[David A. R. <dr...@ju...>]

Hello Everyone,

I'm trying to determine which Intel GE chipsets support dedicated MACs 
for the IPMI subsystem.

The reason I ask is that I have a few Intel 82541-based systems which 
shares the MAC between the machine and IPMI and this solution seems to 
have performance, management (ping), and stray traffic issues (IPMI 
packets occasionally leak to the host interface where the host side 
sends back ICMP port unreachable errors).  I've worked around this issue 
with the use of iptables filters on Linux but I rather avoid this. 

I have several other machines which use Broadcom BCM 5721 which have 
amdedicated MAC for IPMI and I find that solution to be far more 
reliable.  It's also nice to have a dedicated MAC so that I can ping the 
IPMI subsystem independently of the host IP.  This ping doesn't seem to 
work with Intel shared-MAC based solutions (Supermicro boards).

Thoughts?

--David