sudden ethernet failure

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

Hardware: Pine64 A64 512MB
OS:  Armbian Buster 20.02.1 (kernel 5.4)

After months of running steady through multiple reboots and sudden power failures, all my boards suddenly lost eth0; all simultaneously; all while powered on and otherwise running without issue. No, I was not logged in and doing things with the system at the time. My router alerted me when the connections dropped out.

Things I tried (and failed):

• different ports on ethernet switch
  
• power cycling (hard reboot)
  
• hook up monitor and keyboard and investigate
  

Investigation discovered no eth0 device. dmesg reports no driver.

lshw is not present on system so I cannot probe hardware and maybe get driver working with modprobe.

So I reflashed the OS and ... no network. dmesg reports no driver.

So I flashed a differnt OS -- Armbian Bionic 20.05.2 (kernel 5.4) -- and ... no network. dmesg output below.

Code:

dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: IRQ eth_wake_irq not found
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: IRQ eth_lpi not found
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: PTP uses main clock
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: 1c30000.ethernet supply phy-io not found, using dummy regulator
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Current syscon value is not the default 2001 (expect 0)
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: No HW DMA feature register supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: RX Checksum Offload Engine supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: COE Type 2
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: TX Checksum insertion supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Normal descriptors
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Chain mode enabled
...
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: EMAC reset timeout
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet eth0: stmmac_dvr_remove: removing driver
dwmac-sun8i: probe of 1c30000.ethernet failed with error -14

Any ideas or assistance appreciated.

[KC9UDX]

This didn't happen during a thunderstorm did it?

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

This didn't happen during a thunderstorm did it?

No. Why?

[KC9UDX]

This didn't happen during a thunderstorm did it?

No. Why?

I've had situations where nearby lightning would induce current in Ethernet cables, causing the smoke to be let out of Ethernet adapters.

[zer0sig]

Not the magic smoke! That's the best part!

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

I'm situated at the base of a mountain. Any would-be lightning goes directly ground. The ethernet cables, at 30cm, are too short to be good antennas to pick up such radiant power anyway.

I'm still working on this. So far, I have not had success at reviving the ethernet ports under any OS. I suppose I must bow to hardware failure, but I do still have a couple of OSes left to try.

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

I have now tried literally every single OS linked to from the A64 wiki page without success. Most of those images won't boot on the 512MB model and, those that do cannot find ethernet hardware.

Any other ideas?

Did they all suffer simultaneous hardware failure?

[lot378]

This all sounds odd may be there's an explanation. Instead of eth0, your systems may have all reverted to Predictable Network Interface Names this is a departure from naming schemes that included eth0. If you run ifconfig you can see a list of network interfaces available to your systems.

What's your condition or description for "cannot find ethernet hardware"?

[Paraplegic Racehorse]

What's your condition or description for "cannot find ethernet hardware"?

 
Per my OP, see this dmesg output (this from Armbian which was running with full networking at time of ethernet loss. I haven't done so much troubleshooting with other bootable OS images, instead just checked for presence of any network with ifconfig and/or nmtui.):

Code:

dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: IRQ eth_wake_irq not found
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: IRQ eth_lpi not found
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: PTP uses main clock
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: 1c30000.ethernet supply phy-io not found, using dummy regulator
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Current syscon value is not the default 2001 (expect 0)
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: No HW DMA feature register supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: RX Checksum Offload Engine supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: COE Type 2
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: TX Checksum insertion supported
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Normal descriptors
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: Chain mode enabled
...
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet: EMAC reset timeout
dwmac-sun8i 1c30000.ethernet eth0: stmmac_dvr_remove: removing driver
dwmac-sun8i: probe of 1c30000.ethernet failed with error -14

The kernel / uboot cannot detect the presence of an ethernet hardware device.

[edit] USB wifi dongles are detected and configured without issue.

[lot378]

I asked the question to shake out further details because things are not adding up here, as you'd agree!

What it points at is another upstream change in the kernel that has disabled networking (that trying other OS fails to detect ethernet reinforces this). How that could manifest in a system that was not upgraded makes no sense. That's why the responses here went around the circle of "switch zapped all the ethernet h/w on the boards" loop.

Are you certain there was no kernel upgrade (degrade)?

Need to look in to reports upstream of this error.