activation of eth0 on Banana PI M2 Zero, how to do best

[bontango]

Hello

I'm quite new with armbian and Banana Pi, but have some experience with Raspberry PI.

I started with Banana PI M2 Zero and armbian because of current unavailibility of Raspberry PI

which is needed for some of my DIY pinball projects https://lisy.dev/

 

With a 5.15.48 Kernel Image I noted that the internal ethernet of M2 Zero is set to disabled, where with a 5.10.60 Kernel from the archive it works.

After some investigation I used the "sun8i-h2-plus-bananapi-m2-zero.dtb" overlay from the 5.10 Kernel with a 5.15.43 Kernel and was happy that eth0 was working again.

 

However as I think it is not advisable to mixing Kernel versions I wrote an user overlay which can activate eth0 on newer kernels (see code below)

 

questions to the experts:

- is my overlay code correct?

- is an user overlay the right method to activate eth0?

- if both answers to these questions is yes, is it worth to include that overlay to the armbian source and how to do that?

 

thanks for your help

 

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
	model = "Banana Pi BPI-M2-Zero";
	compatible = "sinovoip,bpi-m2-zero\0allwinner,sun8i-h2-plus";

	/* 
	 * enable onboard eth0 on Banana PI M2 zero
	 * which is disabled by default
	 * bontango 08.2022
	 *
	 * compile with
	 * dtc -I dts -O dtb -o m2-zero-eth0.dtbo m2-zero-eth0.dts
	 * move m2-zero-eth0.dtbo to /boot/overlay-user
	 * add line "user-overlays=m2-zero-eth0" to /boot/armbianEnv.txt	 
	 */
	fragment@0 {
		target-path = "/aliases";
		__overlay__ {
			ethernet0 = "/soc/ethernet@1c30000";
		};
	};
	
	fragment@1 {
		target = <&emac>;
		__overlay__ {
			status = "okay";
			phy-handle = <&int_mii_phy>;
			phy-mode = "mii";
			allwinner,leds-active-low;
		};
	};
};

 

 

[Igor]

On 8/28/2022 at 11:49 AM, bontango said:

questions to the experts:

- is my overlay code correct?

- is an user overlay the right method to activate eth0?

- if both answers to these questions is yes, is it worth to include that overlay to the armbian source and how to do that?

 

1. Looks good.

2. Yes

3. https://docs.armbian.com/Process_Contribute/, always add patches to CURRENT (5.15.y) and EDGE (5.19.y). Usually patch can be identical.

 

Look here:

https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/kernel/archive/sunxi-5.19/patches.armbian/arm-dts-overlay-sun8i-h3-cpu-clock-add-overclock.patch
https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/kernel/archive/sunxi-5.19/patches.armbian/Move-sun50i-h6-pwm-settings-to-its-own-overlay.patch

https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/patch/kernel/archive/sunxi-5.19/patches.armbian/arm-dts-overlay-Add-Overlays-for-sunxi.patch

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/4165

 

It is handy to use ./compile.sh EXPERT=yes CREATE_PATCHES="yes" command line to help make patches.