elyograg

The WAN port is back to eth0 now.

Today there was a new firmware package. After reboot, the LAN interface is gone again. A power cycle did not help.

In the last few months, some upgrades would break the port and others would fix it. One of the recent upgrades I made was to update to kernel 6.0 ... since then it looks like the LAN port has been there consistently. Curiously, the WAN port got renamed from eth0 to eth1 and that also seems to be consistent after every reboot. My netplan config does not have any network device names in it, so that name change doesn't break anything.

I upgraded my kernel again today and now the LAN port shows up in the OS. It works with both a cold boot and a warm reboot. elyograg@legolas:~$ ip a 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 54:10:ec:69:2a:04 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.217.165/24 brd 192.168.217.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0 valid_lft 10776sec preferred_lft 10776sec inet6 fe80::e711:cec1:6580:b9c9/64 scope link noprefixroute valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 3: enp1s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN group default qlen 1000 link/ether be:4f:ec:fc:14:a2 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff elyograg@legolas:~$ uname -a Linux legolas 6.0.5-rockchip64 #22.08.8 SMP PREEMPT Fri Oct 28 15:15:06 UTC 2022 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux elyograg@legolas:~$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Release: 22.04 Codename: jammy

I upgraded my kernel again today and now the LAN port shows up in the OS. It works with both a cold boot and a warm reboot. elyograg@legolas:~$ ip a 1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000 link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00 inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever inet6 ::1/128 scope host valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000 link/ether 54:10:ec:69:2a:04 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 192.168.217.165/24 brd 192.168.217.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute eth0 valid_lft 10776sec preferred_lft 10776sec inet6 fe80::e711:cec1:6580:b9c9/64 scope link noprefixroute valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever 3: enp1s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state DOWN group default qlen 1000 link/ether be:4f:ec:fc:14:a2 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff elyograg@legolas:~$ uname -a Linux legolas 6.0.5-rockchip64 #22.08.8 SMP PREEMPT Fri Oct 28 15:15:06 UTC 2022 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux elyograg@legolas:~$ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Release: 22.04 Codename: jammy

Update: I haven't had that port working for a while now. For a brief time after I installed the full firmware, it was working, and now it doesn't any more. Cold boot does not seem to help. I did a complete reinstall with the jammy build and it still doesn't work.

I started this journey with DietPi on a nanopi r4s. I asked about it on the DietPi forum, and they basically said "Our distro is a bunch of scripts on top of Armbian. We can't really help you with a kernel problem." So I reimaged with Armbian and I'm here now. Background with DietPi: When I first boot the DietPi image, the LAN port works. This is on kernel 5.10.63. Then as soon as I log into it via ssh on the IP address acquired by the LAN port, it proceeds to auto-upgrade software, including the kernel, which goes to 5.15.25. During the upgrade, I got messages saying a bunch of firmware for the r8169 driver was not there. Installing armbian-firmware-full gets rid of that error, but does not help. Once it reboots into the new kernel, the LAN port will not get link, and cannot even be seen by Linux. I cannot make it work no matter what I do. Some things I tried made the system unbootable. The WAN port does continue to work. So I grabbed the latest Armbian image for the r4s. When I boot that, the LAN port never works, but the WAN port works just fine. For what I am trying to do with the device, I need both ports working. I tried updating all the software on the system, including installing the -edge-rockchip64 linux packages. I just cannot make it work. Looking deeper into the dietpi initial boot with 5.10.63, I discovered that it loads the r8169 driver, but the newer versions don't.