Mellanox MT26448 NIC reports link when cable is unplugged in Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Issue

When there is no link to the host, the mlx4_en driver will display link up followed by link down messages, like so:

Jan 29 15:09:49 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Up
Jan 29 15:09:49 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Down
Jan 29 15:09:57 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Up
Jan 29 15:09:57 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Down
Jan 29 15:10:06 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Up
Jan 29 15:10:06 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Down
Jan 29 15:10:14 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Up
Jan 29 15:10:14 hostname kernel: mlx4_en: eth5: Link Down

• Customer is facing the issue where carrier is toggled as above even when the interface is not connected via a cable and the link is down. These link notifications trigger false alarms. They use a monitoring program which scrapes /var/log/messages file and reports false alarms.