Skupsy

Well, I digged a little around this issue. It looks like a patch to the kernel driver of the xradio module is somewhat incomplete. So I patched the kernel and now the Wi-Fi works like a charm... well, not really (because of the XR819 module) but at least it gets the stored MAC address, as before. For anyone interested, here is attached the required patch; unfortunately a rebuild of the kernel is needed. 22-05.0-orangepizero-xradio_skupsy_20220520.patch

Confirmed on multiple devices here too. I can confirm that reverting to kernel 5.10.60 temporarily solves the issue; kernels above 5.15.25 have the same issue too. Changing or force the MAC address of the interface (i.e. with macchanger) doesn't solve the issue and breaks wifi functionality completely. There should be some bug in the kernel driver, but the statement above suggests that it may be more serious than the bare read of MAC address (from device firmware?). For applications where a static MAC address is preferred to assign a specific IP address by DHCP, I opted for statically assign that IP on the board network config.