networking issue on a banana pi [SOLVED]

[jyoung]

I'm setting up gentoo on a banana pi, and it's not able to connect to the network. During boot, eth0 produces a large number of messages, but I think the most important are

eth0: soliciting a DHCP lease
dhcp_openbpf: eth0: Protocol not available
eth0: carrier lost

and then later
dhcp_openbpf: eth0: Protocol not available
eth0: probing for an IPv4LL address
arp_new: Protocol not available

I've search for the string "dhcp_openbpf: eth0: Protocol not available", and there is one forum thread

http://github.com/kobolabs/Kobo-Reader/issues/105

However, the thread ends with the folks basically giving up on the bug and switching from dhcpc to udhcpc. Interestingly, in both our cases ifconfig shows that the network interface is detected, although it's not assign an IP.

For my setup, I've used the stage3 arm v7 tarball to get me started, and then configured the kernel by hand. It seems like there might be something related to the kernel, however I've checked my kernel against this individual's kernel
http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Banana_Pi_the_Gentoo_Way#Compile_the_Kernel

Grepping for BPF in their kernel shows only one item enabled, CONFIG_HAVE_BPF_JIT=y, which is also enabled in my kernel. dmesg doesn't show anything that looks like an error message related to "net" or "eth0". lscpi is also isn't much help in this specific case. It turns out that on the banana pi the "network card" is more integrated with the other systems, and doesn't go through a PCI interface.

I'd be grateful for any help on this mystery!

[jyoung]

I should add that I'm using openrc, and that net.eth0 is in default, but dhcpcd is not. My desktop (that I'm writing from now) is configured this way too.

When I add dhcpcd to default on the banana pi, the error messages I reported in my previous post are not present at boot. However, it's still not able to connect to the network. ifconfig still detects the device, but doesn't assign it an IP, and there are no apparent error messages relating to "net" or "eth0" in dmesg.

Also, the problem is almost certainly with the banana pi's configuration, and not with the network, since it's able to connect when I boot it from an ubuntu SD card instead of the gentoo SD card it's working from now.

[grknight]

CONFIG_BPF should be set when CONFIG_NET is set.

CONFIG_NET is required to get any useful networking in the kernel flowing.

[jyoung]

In my current kernel, CONFIG_BPF and CONFIG_NET are both set.

[NeddySeagoon]

Moved from Kernel & Hardware to Gentoo on ARM.

Its one of these.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[pietinger]

[jyoung]

pietinger, I just checked, and those options are enabled in the kernel, aside from Netfilter. The BPI is connected to my home router, so I don't think that's the issue. I have not enabled all of the suboptions, for example IPv6 has quite a lot, although most seem related to router functionality, and this isn't a router.

And, yes, I'm configuring through menuconfig, so not totally "by hand".

[pietinger]

I would like to see the complete "dmesg" after you would set a static IP address (simply use "netifrc" as described in our AMD64 handbook) an do a reboot (so we see also kernel boot messages). This is to see if its a kernel problem or "only" dhcpcd.

(Please use wgetpaste for this)

[jyoung]

Okay, I've setup netirfc to request a static IP, rebooted, and here's the dmesg output

http://pastebin.com/PhhJ4V4P

Also, when I run ifconfig the inet field is now populated with the IP I requested

[jyoung]

With a static IP set and dhcpcd in the default runlevel, I'm able to ping other machines on the network, and the router. With a dynamic IP, I can't. I'm not able to ping an outside URL in either case.

This is the configuration I used in /etc/conf.d/net for the static IP

[pietinger]

jyoung, thanks for your dmesg. Now I am sure that it is not a problem with your kernel. As far as I understand the problem in the thread you already have found was ALSO a problem with: dhcpcd AND old kernel version.

This looks good:

[jyoung]

That's really strange. I've been compiling and installing kernel 5.15.74, which is the only option in grub.cfg. But, uname -a confirms that the current kernel is 3.4.103. How is this possible? During the install, I followed the handbook on installing grub, although I think a next step might be to repeat it, just be be sure. But where did 3.4.103 come from? Interestingly, I've never been prompted with a grub bootup screen.

[jyoung]

Okay, I see that I did something very silly. For a banana pi, there's a specialized bootloader called u-boot. It's spelled out pretty clearly in the how-to that I linked, but in a section that I skipped because I didn't do cross compiling. So, I think what I did with grub was totally ignored. Okay, let me mess with u-boot and report back.

[jyoung]

Okay, I'm a little perplexed regarding uBoot. Based on what I've been able to find, the procedure is to compile uImage

[jyoung]

I've enabled the grub_platforms_uboot flag for grub, and I'm going to give grub another try.

[jyoung]

Okay, I'm running

[jyoung]

Actually, I think I figured that one out. The BPI doesn't have an internal clock, and since it can't sync it's time with a network clock, it defaults back to 2010 at each reboot (why 2010?). Anyhow, this created a bunch of warnings during the build which I was ignoring (they were warnings, not errors). However, when I manually reset the time to the correct value, I was able to emerge grub.

[jyoung]

Okay, the new grub is compiled and installed, but this experiment didn't work. Here's the usage:

[jyoung]

There's a note at the top of the tutorial about u-boot, which sends me here
http://linux-sunxi.org/U-Boot#Compile_U-Boot

Following the directions there, I created a boot.cmd file

[jyoung]

I've tried several variations on compiling a new uImage kernel and then copying it over to the location where the bootloader is expecting uImage. This looks like

[NeddySeagoon]

jyoung.

crossdev builds cross toolchains for you.
There is an arm64 worked example of building a cross toolchain for a Raspberry Pi.
It goes on into building a kernel.

The tuple you need is the CHOST in the stage3 talball, which comes from your profile.
You need

[pingtoo]

jyoung,

I don't have banana pi, I am raspberry pi 4b owner. I am no expert for u-boot, but I have a nanopi r4s which boot with uboot which can give me a little bit of reference.

I think may be a second pair of eyes can help catch something missing

If you don't mind, I like to reset to beginning,

• what is your current plan?
  • Using mainline uboot?
    
  • Using sunxi uboot?
    
  • Using sunxi kernel? (seems only at linux v3.x)
    
  • Using mainline kernel?
• What did you plan for init?
  • openrc?
    
  • systemd?

From most of your post in this thread it seems to be you are able to boot in to a working system except the working system is not to your like, so you want to change it?

if I am right about you can boot into working system, lets collect some parameters of current system so we can later reference them.

• list of SD partitions

  Code:

  fdisk -x /dev/mmcblk0

  
  
• current kernel command line

  Code:

  dmesg|grep "Kernel command line:"

I am still trying to figure out how to see uboot environment variables from linux.

[jyoung]

NeddySeagoon, thanks for confirming that those instructions were for cross compiling. It does indeed take ~6 hours to compile a new kernel on the BPI! I've been letting it run overnight. Luckily, building the uImage is pretty fast if the kernel is otherwise compiled.

pingtoo, I'm currently booting off the uboot binary and uImage that came in a tarball from this tutorial

http://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Banana_Pi_the_Gentoo_Way#Compile_the_Kernel

under the link "Banana Pi Boot Files". That setup works in the sense that I can boot the BPI, although it's been impossible to update. As you pointed out, the sunxi kernel is quite old, and seems to be the source of the networking issue that started this thread. I'd really like to switch over to the mainline kernel so that I could update as needed.

The system that's currently installed is using openrc, which I'd like to use.

Here are the partitions. Note that it reads as /dev/sda because (at the moment) I'm booting the BPI off ubuntu and then chrooting into the gentoo SD through a USB port. This gives the BPI network access so I can use emerge, but most of the experiments I've done have had the BPI booted off the gentoo SD, which then appears as /dev/mmcblk0

[pingtoo]

jyoung,

if /dev/sda1 is not already mounted somewhere please mount it read-only for example mount -r /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot

Do you have the uImage from Banana Pi the Gentoo Way/Downloads Banana Pi Boot Files?
if you do and you can examine it by

[NeddySeagoon]

jyoung,

Its been a while since I used uboot. Since the very early days of Pi 3 in 64 bit mode, when getting a serial console. was doing well. The USB chip driver didn't work yet, so that's all there was :)

The key line here