I have a few ASRock Rack motherboards, and both having a UEFI setting about Bonding.
On one of them, it’s enabled in the UEFI by default.
What’s this setting do?
I haven’t run any enterprise boards, but Bonding is usually to team NIC’s together.
Some BMC’s have a dedicated NIC all of their own, and some share a NIC with the main system.
Could this bonding, possibly be so you don’t have to run a dedicated NIC just for the BMC maybe?
Inside which menu is the bonding option?
Just an outsider spitballing here
I’m not sure where I saw it. It was in a networking area.
It might be like you said, a way to access management over the main NIC rather than the dedicated NIC. Not really sure.
Yeah, ASRock Rack usually defaults to a configuration where the IPMI interface can be accessed over both the dedicated management NIC and one of the general-purpose NICs. They bond them together as one single network interface in the IPMI configuration. If you turn off the bonding, you can configure (or disable) each interface separately.
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Does it cause performance or latency issues?
Is it okay to turn off interface bonding for IPMI?
I’d make sure you have a booting system first, so if something goes wrong and you lose network access, you can reset BMC via BIOS or a commandline tool. But yes, you could e.g. disable the bond and then disable the second (general-purpose) interface, so IPMI is only accessible on the dedicated management NIC, if you have an isolated management network.
I don’t know. The way it’s supposed to work is that BMC configures the network controller via NCSI, which is a management sideband interface of sorts. Basically the controller dedicates some resources to providing a virtual NIC for management purposes, separate from what’s visible to the rest of the system. This is transparent and doesn’t affect any other use.
However, I’ve seen some suggestions that ASRock Rack didn’t configure their previous intel X550 controllers very well — mine certainly behaves like it never idles, though I haven’t gotten around to performance tests on it yet. Since it’s constantly running, it also doesn’t reset during reboots, and I’ve seen some interesting BMC-driven configuration remnants carry over until a full power cycle.
The Broadcom BCM57416 controller would be a new platform with new sample code for them, so in theory any past mistakes wouldn’t carry forward. But I’m light on information here, so not really sure either way.
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