[U-Boot] U-Boot causes ethernet packet loss under Linux

[Mark Kettenis]

> Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:20:13 +0200
> From: Urs Schulz <uboot at ursschulz.de>
> 
> Hey there,
> 
> I have several issues with the newer U-Boot versions on my Banana Pi.
> 
> I recently decided to upgrade some of my Banana Pis to the latest
> U-Boot, the last version I had there was 2015.04. Unfortunately the
> upgrade to 2017.05 caused weird packet-losses on the ethernet interface
> in Linux (took me several days to find out, that it's actually u-boot
> causing the problems). When downgrading to my old 2015.04, everythings
> works fine.
> 
> The packet loss only occurs in low-load situations, for example with
> ping or ssh. I have successfully transfered some large files over the
> network with netcat without any issues. So maybe it's some
> powersaving-issue with Linux. But obviously, keeping the network
> interface under full load at all times can't be the right solution to
> the problem. About 10-20% of all packets get lost with ping.
> 
> So I had hoped, it is some kind of "temporary issue" fixed in the next
> version and today decided to try again with a newer version.
> Unfortunately 2017.07 has even more issues:
> 
> First, the packet-loss issue hasn't disappeared. Sad.
> 
> Second, this version is no longer able to turn on the hdmi interface on
> the pi but seems to boot the system (after a minute or so it is
> "reachable" via network).
> 
> The same applies to 2017.09-rc2.

The GMAC initialization on the Banana Pi has been borked for a while.
It needs:

  https://lists.denx.de/pipermail/u-boot/2017-July/299703.html

But it seems that didn't make it onto master yet.