Meson8b-dwmac probe issue on boot

Start Boot
1

I stumbled onto this when configuring my Solitude board to use an iscsi root drive. My /boot and /efi are on a local SD card, but everything else is iscsi. What’s happening is the system fails to boot about 50-60% of the time due to an issue with meson8b-dwmac. It may be related to a previous but reported a couple of years ago.
Its kernel-level probe race between the ethernet MAC driver and PHY reset timing on the meson8b-dwmac/RTL8211F combo.

[ 9.204417] end0: renamed from eth0
[ 9.212067] mmcblk1: mmc1:59b4 USD00 58.9 GiB
[ 9.222934] dwc2 ff400000.usb: supply vusb_d not found, using dummy regulator
[ 9.224729] dwc2 ff400000.usb: supply vusb_a not found, using dummy regulator
[ 9.234058] mmcblk1: p1 p2 p3
[ 9.236903] dwc2 ff400000.usb: EPs: 7, …
[ 9.259538] end0: Register MEM_TYPE_PAGE_POOL RxQ-0
[ 9.263448] end0: cannot attach to PHY (error: -ENODEV)

Hoping maybe there’s a DTB fix for this, maybe a reset delay or retry setting?

2

What kernel are you using? The linux-6.12.y-lc has stmmac: meson: retry phy connnection · libre-computer-project/libretech-linux@3492fe6 · GitHub to perform phy retries because of the mdio-mux

Can also be found on linux-6.18.y-lc with net: stmmac: meson: retry PHY connection during probe · libre-computer-project/libretech-linux@ed80a6e · GitHub

3

I’m using a mainline kernel. 6.18.43 to be exact.