05-08-2019, 04:21 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-08-2019, 04:27 PM by WhiteDragon.
Edit Reason: tenses... always a bother
)
(05-08-2019, 12:13 PM)AZClusterboard Wrote:(05-07-2019, 02:45 PM)WhiteDragon Wrote: At the moment I'm using Armbian 5.84 Debian Stretch with a 4.19.38 Kernel I built from source. It didn't work out of the box though.
I had to apply this fix described in the Armbian forums linked above.
I figure that the USB Network Dongle was mapped to a lower Hardware ID and the SoPine can only maintain a single network connection, thus the onboard NIC on the SoPine Module was deactivated. I figured furthermore that the switch on the Clusterboard is only powered, when at least one of the NICs on the SoPine Modules tries to communicate with it (I guess some sort of XOR gate controlling V_in or somesuch nonsense).
Since that did not happen due to the network bug the switch stayed "dark".
When I wrote my guide, the LTS was the only one that worked. I've gotten them to fix it since and add nightly builds to the download page. I also see they built a new image as of 5/3 so I'll have to test it out. All the images were working as of 5/3 but I'll have to check the new ones.
I just got both of the 5/3 (Debain and Ubuntu) images to work. I cannot duplicate the problem you're having.
That's strange indeed! I tried tried both the Xenial (3.x Kernel) and stable releases (Stretch and Bionic 4.x Kernel) before I built from source but to no avail. The only thing the Xenial (3.x Kernel) provided was a light on the built-in Heartbeat LED. However I did not try any of the precompiled releases with neither USB NIC nor UART (since I did not have a UART to USB dongle at hand as stated in the original post).
I only got the idea to try the USB NIC after I built a Kernel from scratch and reached a point of fair frustration and figured it might work as a last resort before I through the board out of a window, since there are USB NICs listed as working on the Armbian section on the SoPine board. (I can add the Apple USB NIC to that list for what it is worth...)
I never tried the nightly builds though. Maybe that would have worked as well, but I don't know. I try to stay away from nightlies; got some bad memories from Debian Etch on a Fujitsu Notebook back in the day...
When I read that a Kernel built from the master branch sources would work I was delighted, but unfortunately it did not do so for me. After I modified the the dtb file according to the the Armbian Forums thread (there was no line towards tx delay whatsoever in the unmodified version of the .dtb file) it started working, albeit after I pulled out the USB NIC. I cannot fathom if it would have worked if I just pulled out the USB NIC without modifying the dtb file, but I hightly doubt it.
I'm glad that you don't experience the same issues I did, but maybe it's due to a different revision of the board? Mine's a Rev. 2.3. What's yours? I don't have the foggiest as to why I was having these issues and would be glad if the root of the problem could be found, so others won't have to go through the hassle of modifying the dtb file after every update or freeze packages. But as of now I blame it on machine heuristics...
