Vontar X4 with JL2101 Gigabit PHY network problems

[unmesh59]

Hardware is confirmed good including network speed by running CoreELEC.

Linux is up, dmesg shows meson8b-dwmac for eth0, ethtool says driver is st_gmac, ip a says eth0 is UP but no IP address

dhclient eth0 hangs

P.S.: To eliminate user error, I pulled out an older Tanix TX3 S905W with a 100M Ethernet interface and it ran this distro fine

[unmesh59]

I plugged in a USB Ethernet adapter and now have network access.

Can I install the JL2101 driver?

[unmesh59]

I have now tried all the S905X4 gigabit variations in boot.config but none of them seem to have the JL2101 driver

[unmesh59]

I found an old discussion on JL2101 at #13 after which I downloaded bookworm-6.6.1, flashed it to a USB drive, added box=vontarx4_gigabit to boot.config, created a box-vontarx4_gigabit.config file and pointed to the meson-sc2-ah212-generic-gbit.dtb file I got from the thread

Now the Ethernet interface is up!

ssh.service seems to be in a restart loop though, and I needed to regenerate the ssh keys to get it to work

iperf3 is showing around 500Mbps incoming and 200Mbps outgoing even though ethtool is showing the link at gigabit. The driver is showing as st_gmac and jl2xx1 is not even loaded

@devmfc, is there a way to get the correct driver loaded?

[devmfc]

Did you try to use the DTB that works from 6.6 with the newer kernels? (Just copy the DTB)
If that doesn't work, could you try the other way around? Copy the meson-sc2-ah212-generic-gbit.dtb to the 6.6 kernel. This to figure out if it is a DTB problem or a kernel problem.

[unmesh59]

Plucky with the dtb from the distro boots to the prompt but wired network is not up. I tried getting onto a wireless network and, though I got an IP address, I get ieee80211 phy0: brcm_inetaddr_changed: fail to get arp ip table err:-52 error messages and even ping to the gateway get no response

Plucky with the dtb from Bookworm, won't get beyond the TV Box splash screen. The VFD shows d:A0

Bookworm with the dtb from the thread boot all the way and the wired network is up.

Bookworm with the dtb from Plucky boots into Android

What am I to make of the fact that, when the network interface is running with Bookworm, it appears to not be using the jl21xx1 driver? Or is lshw not expected to show that?

[unmesh59]

I did some reading and learned that there is a command that would show the PHY

tvbox:~#ls -l /sys/bus/mdio_bus/devices/*/driver
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Aug 8 23:56 /sys/bus/mdio_bus/devices/mdio_mux-0.0:00/driver -> '../../../../../../../../bus/mdio_bus/drivers/Generic PHY'

How much does it matter that a Generic PHY driver is being used?

[devmfc]

Exactly, J2101 is the Gigabit PHY, not the ethernet network driver, that is always stmmac.
To find the PHY you have: cat /sys/bus/mdio_bus/devices/*/{phy_interface,phy_id}
0x001cc916 => RTL8211F
0x937c4032 => JL2101

And IIRC the JL2101 does indeed use the generic PHY driver.

Bookworm and Plucky kernels and DTB's are exactly the same, so the behavior you have seen doesn't make much sense...

[unmesh59]

The Bookworm DTB I'm referring to is from the thread. When I have time, I will try the one from the Bookworm distro.

[unmesh59]

I booted with the Plucky distro and added an ASIX based 100mb Ethernet adapter to get the network up.

The PHY for the built in GE interface is 0x937c4032 => JL2101

tvbox:~#lshw -c network
*-interface:0
description: Wireless interface
product: 4339
vendor: Broadcom
physical id: 1
bus info: mmc@2:0001:1
logical name: mmc2:0001:1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 84:38:38:40:63:ed
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes driver=brcmfmac driverversion=6.37.45 firmware=(r) ip=192.168.102.80 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11
*-network:0
description: Ethernet interface
physical id: 5
logical name: eth0
serial: 00:ea:22:09:03:3b
size: 1Gbit/s
capacity: 1Gbit/s
capabilities: ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation
configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=st_gmac driverversion=6.12.37-meson64 duplex=full link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=1Gbit/s

tvbox:~#ethtool eth0
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Supported pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Supported FEC modes: Not reported
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Advertised pause frame use: Symmetric Receive-only
Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised FEC modes: Not reported
Link partner advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
1000baseT/Full
Link partner advertised pause frame use: No
Link partner advertised auto-negotiation: Yes
Link partner advertised FEC modes: Not reported
Speed: 1000Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Auto-negotiation: on
master-slave cfg: preferred slave
master-slave status: slave
Port: MII
PHYAD: 0
Transceiver: external
Supports Wake-on: ug
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0x0000003f (63)
drv probe link timer ifdown ifup
Link detected: yes

But no IP address on eth0

networkctl renew eth0 doesn't work but setting a static IP address and restarting the daemon works. The firewall with the DHCP server can then be pinged

[unmesh59]

And I can get 500Mbps on tailscale which is amazing for this little box!