bnx2x: link detected up at startup even when it should be down

Hi all,

I am working with a HP blade which has a bnx2x based card (Broadcom
NetXtreme II BCM57810 10 Gigabit Ethernet).
I am using a 3.2 linux kernel, which works very well except on
detecting the link state at startup.
I have my ethernet interfaces linked with a bond, and I want to
configure it for HA (in miimon mode).
I am using a managed switch which helps me in disabling/enabling ports.

When the port is disabled, at startup, the link is detected "UP".
When I enable the port, it is still "UP", and when I disable it again,
then it is detected "DOWN".

I have tried the latest 3.6-rc6 kernel, and it works well (link is
"DOWN" at startup when port is disabled).
Then I bisected it, and I found out that the commit which makes it
working (yes, it is an inverse bisect, thanks to this powerful git
tool :)) is :

a334872224a67b614dc888460377862621f3dac7 is the first bad commit
commit a334872224a67b614dc888460377862621f3dac7
Author: Barak Witkowski [off-list ref]
Date:   Mon Apr 23 03:04:46 2012 +0000

    bnx2x: add afex support

    Following patch adds afex multifunction support to the driver (afex
    multifunction is based on vntag header) and updates FW version
used to 7.2.51.

    Support includes the following:

    1. Configure vif parameters in firmware (default vlan, vif id, default
       priority, allowed priorities) according to values received from NIC.
    2. Configure FW to strip/add default vlan according to afex vlan mode.
    3. Notify link up to OS only after vif is fully initialized.
    4. Support vif list set/get requests and configure FW accordingly.
    5. Supply afex statistics upon request from NIC.
    6. Special handling to L2 interface in case of FCoE vif.

    Signed-off-by: Barak Witkowski [off-list ref]
    Signed-off-by: Eilon Greenstein [off-list ref]
    Signed-off-by: David S. Miller [off-list ref]

This commit is present in the 3.5.y stable branch, but not the 3.2.y one.
Is there a workaround which would make this feature work correctly
even on older kernels ?
It does not seem to be trivial, but I may miss something as this
driver is pretty big...

Cheers,
JM