On Mon,  9 Dec 2019 14:45:30 -0800, Maciej Żenczykowski wrote:

Example use cases might be:
 - a port being stolen by the nic for remote serial console, remote
   power management or some other sort of debugging functionality
   (crash collection, gdb, direct access to some other microcontroller
   on the nic or motherboard, remote management of the nic itself).

This use case makes me a little uncomfortable.

Could you elaborate what protocols and products are in need of this
functionality?

Why can't the NIC just get its own IP like it usually does with NCSI?