FreeBSD and gig ethernet
#1
Bought 4 Rock64 v 2.0 boards.  Visually, they look identical.  
Objective: 2 clusters, high availability
cluster one - pihole running Armbian
cluster two - NFS server running FreeBSD

I was able to get the Armbian systems working with pihole without issue.

1. On FreeBSD, only one of the 4 boards will recognize the 1-gig ethernet.  The other three boards don't work. I can take the SDCard out of the working machine and place it in any of the other three machines - no ethernet.

2. If I manually downgrade the 1-gig connection to 100 MB, it works.

3. Verified 1-gig works on all four boards under Armbian

4. This led me to believe that a "plug-in" kernel hack is needed to instruct FreeBSD how to properly use this hardware.  I contacted FreeBSD-ARM and FreeBSD-USB forum.  No solution.  They suspect this is a hardware bug.  I asked if their is a software band-aid such as a kernel overlay - no response. No response from the forum typically means everyone was thinking "I don't personally know of a kernel overlay for that, so I'm not speaking up".  No answer typically means no.

5. Tried to OpenBSD/NetBSD - can't even get it installed w/o serial console configuration (which I didn't have on-hand); ---or--- they also experienced the problem and just didn't connect to Ethernet.

Question for Pine64 team and anyone/everyone who reads this:

Can anyone confirm that this is related to: minor differences in hardware, faulty hardware --or-- u-boot misconfiguration, etc..  I just want to put a period on the end of this sentence.  I've worked hard to resolve this and successfully got 1 working; but not the other 3.  All 4 of them run Armbian w/o any issue.  Only 1 will run BSD.
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Messages In This Thread
FreeBSD and gig ethernet - by roboman - 11-02-2021, 11:23 AM
RE: FreeBSD and gig ethernet - by tllim - 11-02-2021, 06:09 PM
RE: FreeBSD and gig ethernet - by Enig123 - 11-04-2021, 12:51 AM

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