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 softwar