On 2020-10-20, Harald Dunkel <harald.dun...@aixigo.com> wrote: > On 10/19/20 9:46 PM, Stuart Henderson wrote: >> On 2020-10-19, Harald Dunkel <ha...@afaics.de> wrote: >>> >>> What would these bypass problems look like? Hopefully the bypass feature >>> can be turned off/ignored. >> >> If there are problems then possibly 2 of the ports either won't work >> or will be connected directly to 2 of the other ports until a magic >> command is sent somehow (either gpio or via some memory mapped io >> port I guess, I don't know the hardware). >> > > You mean the bypass might be active, even though its not configured and > power is on? That sounds like a fatal problem to me. Is this restricted > to OpenBSD or are other operating systems affected as well?
I don't know how it works on this hardware. The general idea of bypass NICs is so that they connect ports straight-through if the OS is not running correctly, so it depends how they detect whether the OS is running as to whether that will work. One would hope that it can be disabled if necessary, but one would also hope that BIOS/firmware vendors don't make silly mistakes and experience has shown that this is not always the case ;) It will probably be OK. But with new hardware, who knows!
