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

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 9:10 AM, Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> 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.

Looking at patchwork [1] there was one minor fix needed, it also
doesn't apply against master so probably needs a v2 to fix those bits
up, Dave what were your plans for the patch?

We've been seeing something similar in Fedora too which sounds like it
could be this so it would be good to get this in for 2017.09.

[1] http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/793903/