OPi Zero: Unreliable Ethernet with 5.3.x (but 4.19.62 works)

[Adrian Cable]

Hi,

Using the latest Armbian release (19.11.3) on OPi Zero (512MB, board revision 1.5) I have a strange issue. On kernel 5.3.x, Ethernet connectivity drops sporadically, around once every couple of minutes, for typically 10 seconds or so and then recovers. When the drop happens, a ping from another machine on the network produces 'no route to host' - then after around 10 seconds or so the network comes back up. The OPi Zero continues running normally during the 'outage', without functional network access. There is nothing in the dmesg log when this happens.

 

Switching to kernel 4.19.62 from armbian-config, everything works perfectly. Back to 5.3.x, the issue starts again.

 

Has anyone seen a similar issue and/or has a fix? Thank you!

 

-Adrian

Board: Orangepi Zero

[dolphs]

we're talking about the OPi Zero LTS here?  Could you try kernel 5.4.x instead of 5.3.x please ?

[ ./compile.sh  BOARD=orangepizero BRANCH=dev RELEASE=buster BUILD_MINIMAL=yes BUILD_DESKTOP=no KERNEL_ONLY=no KERNEL_CONFIGURE=no ]

 

[Adrian Cable]

@dolphs - actually this is the "original" (non-LTS) OPi Zero.

 

I believe I tried 5.4.x and had the same issue, but will double check.

 

-Adrian

[Werner]

If you do not need any special features of 5.3.x for your OPi you should stick to 4.19.x for now since 5.3.x is EOL already (4.19 is LTS) and kind a heavily patched anyways to support the SBC quite well.

[Adrian Cable]

Yes - 5.4.1-sunxi #19.11.3.336 gives the same problem.

 

Happy to stick with 4.19.x @Werner, but I have some OPi Zero LTS boards on the way, and my understanding is that the thermal sensor doesn't work with 4.19.62, but does work with 5.4.1. Is that correct?

 

-Adrian

[Werner]

Never really tested that. I know that I can grab the CPU temp from armbianmonitor. 

[Adrian Cable]

@Werner - are you saying that you get correct thermal readouts with armbianmonitor on OPi Zero LTS? I definitely don't!

 

Time        CPU    load %cpu %sys %usr %nice %io %irq   CPU  C.St.
11:21:33:  480MHz  0.05   8%   4%   4%   0%   0%   0% -737°C  0/4
11:21:38:  480MHz  0.05   8%   4%   3%   0%   0%   0% -495°C  0/4
11:21:43:  480MHz  0.04   6%   4%   2%   0%   0%   0%  2.2°C  0/4
11:21:49:  480MHz  0.04   7%   4%   2%   0%   0%   0%  474°C  0/4
11:21:54:  480MHz  0.04   8%   4%   3%   0%   0%   0%  -11°C  0/4
11:21:59:  480MHz  0.03   7%   3%   3%   0%   0%   0%  2.4°C  0/4

 

Everything works fine for me with the non-LTS boards.

 

-Adrian

[Werner]

Misunderstanding, I have a non-LTS board.