I know that told you the ID of your chip but also told you to switch to phy1 but you didn't. I think It is possible to use the generic driver but don't know if It will work. Changes in dtb must be accurate.

Thank you! I'm still in the middle of a long build (chromium). I'll be able to check the flash-image-DDR4-1g_1cs_5-1200_750 image with the specific device I own with frequency scaling enabled and report if it is stable or not. It will crash pretty reliably if the firmware doesn't have the change I submitted here: https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/mv-ddr-marvell/commit/622677674cf34ef8fdf75b0c580d27efc8628ae8

Apologies, I somehow missed this comment until after I'd posted mine Would have saved me a fair bit of searching had I read it

@maka Thanks for this suggestion. I'll look further into this. The reason I made that change was because you suggested it here : It works well to auto load the maxio module on startup without resorting to manual modprobe commands. Is it really possible to use a generic driver for this maxio NIC chip?

I would always go RPi, as I have been burned going with a different board in the past. This may not be a fair reflection on the Orange Pi, as I can only speak for having purchased an Odroid C1+ many years ago. The C1+ was a very capable board, and definitely more capable than the RPi offering at the time. However, there just is no substitute for the support and community around the RPi. I now have 3, and even my original RPi 1 Model B+ is still supported by the RPi foundation, and still gets modern kernel and OS updates. This is a board running off just 512MB RAM, A 700 MHz single-core 32-bit processer and released over 11 years ago. No one could complain if they had dropped support long ago, but they didn't, and they still show no signs of dropping support any time soon. Hardkernel, on the other hand, pretty much dumped support for the Odroid C1+ as soon as it released, so it is stuck on a 3.x kernel and a uBoot from 2011. If it wasn't for the Armbian project this board just would not be useable, and even then, we are still stuck on a 15 year old uBoot solution. None of this may be important to you, and like I say, my experience is not likely a like-for-like comparison with the Orange Pi, but the long term support you get from the RPi foundation and the wider community around it is not even close to being matched by any other vendor, and (personally) I don't like supporting vendors who effectively manufacture e-waste.