Need assistance fixing a tg3 driver side-effect on IPMI

[Steffen Grunewald <Steffen.Grunewald@aei.mpg.de>]

Hi everyone,

I've been running into a problem while installing Debian Wheezy on a bunch
of 6-year old machines which have been running Squeeze happily for years.

They are SuperMicro-based (H8SSL opteron board), with two BCM95704A6 (Tigon3) 
interfaces, and a BMC/IPMI card (SuperMicro 1U) which shares eth0.

With a 2.6.32 kernel (and the 3.102 version of the tg3 driver) everything is fine.

With Debian's 3.2 (and tg3 3.121) I lose access to the IPMI LAN (or LANplus)
interface as soon as the tg3 module has been loaded. Even shutting down doesn't
give the interface back - I've got to pull the power plug.

Trying to git bisect the corresponding changes to the tg3 driver, I'm running
against a wall at the point where the source code has been moved to another
subtree back in 2011 (still a long time past Squeeze). I appear to be unable
to go back beyond that.

Can you advise how to find out when IPMI access got lost, and how to re-enable
it? Any suggestion is appreciated.
I suppose it wouldn't be as easy as "get the old source from 2.6.32, and plug
it into drivers/net/ethernet/broadcom, then rebuild the kernel" -?

Please keep me on CC, thanks.

Regards,
 Steffen