Ethernet through the dock?

[scholbert]

Reading OP - I still cannot understand why you are unable to run when powered: my power is old Samsung wall wart with Pine64 pinephone red cable, so again nothing fancy! What seems to work for me is plug everything (including power) into the dongle, then plug it into the phone. I think the phone is only enumerating stuff when it first connects to the dongle as I can get USB pendrive and keyboard/mouse to work this way, but not if I hotplug them after the dongle is connected to the phone. Similarly HDMI does work on my dongle. Last, when I plug in my dongle I often get a lot of clicking and a load of ANX messages in the log: about 50% of the time things have settled after 30 seconds and all the bits I expect to work are OK. Otherwise I unplug and try again. I have been neurotic that I have a physically loose connection but in fact think it is the ANX code that can be temperamental as I have had "the clicking symptom" kick off when the phone & dongle were flat on the desk and AFAIK the only movement was the earth rotating!

Hi,

i agree that it's kind of strange that the LAN chip only works with the dock unpowered.
As i got no original convergence dock i'm not able to do some mesurements.
So if this is the wrong place to post... tell me and i will delete my post.

Normally unpowered hubs enumerate with 100mA max. power.
If you then connect an external USB-LAN adapter, which enumerates with e.g. 250mA,
the driver would give a "unsufficient power" power message.
If you power up the hub before connecting to the Pinephone, it will enumerate as self powered hub.
Everything will be nice with the external USB-LAN adapter then.

Anyway i'd like to report what's happening when i use my USB‑C Digital AV Multiport Adapter (e.g. Apple-MUF82ZM and China-Clones).
These adapters seem to have a PD controller, a HDMI Bridge and a USB-Hub inside.

So this is the behaviour with the 5.10 kernel:
1. Scenario:
plug the adapter into the phone without power supply -> device get's recogized, hub is recognized as bus-powered, ANX7688 gets initialized after a few seconds
attach the power supply to the Type-C port -> PD is handled, charging symbol is showing up, but hub is not changing to self-powered
attach the USB-LAN Adapter to the Type-A port -> device gets enumerated but fails because device needs more than 100mA and self power wasn't recognized

2. Scenario (O.K.):
plug the adapter into the phone with power supply already attached -> device get's recogized, hub is now recognized as self-powered, ANX7688 gets initialized after a few seconds
attach the USB-LAN Adapter to the Type-A port -> now device gets enumerated and driver loads o.k.

This is very similar to dukla2000's observation.

In the meantime i also had a conversation with megous, and he told me the USB-PD function and USB role switching is still kind of flaky with the latest mobian kernel.
Megous is still very active to find some flaws in the kernel drivers for the Pinephone and already implemented new stuff for the ANX7688 driver.
Though these patches have not found their way to the mobian kernel yet.
So maybe we should contact a-wai to tell him about Megous' latest achievements...
See here for some of his latest patches in Dec. 2020:
https://github.com/megous/linux/commits/.../usb/typec

EDIT:
O.K. i just saw there'd been little adjustments in the mobian kernel repo... but parts are still missing... ayway this is not the right place to discuss these things i guess.

As i pointed out in the beginning... this info is not directly related to the Convergence-Dock, but it may have to do with an uncomplete implementation on the kernel side.

Cheers,
scholbert