Dear Alexander Stein,
In message 201006011214.46804.alexander.stein@systec-electronic.com you wrote:
The problem was a defined CONFIG_RESET_PHY_R. Inside reset_phy
eth_init(gd->bd);
is called which actually starts the hardwre resulting in timeouts as described. According to the comment above this line (seems to be copied to every at91 board implementation) this is only needed if linux has a NFS root which needs a preinitialized ethernet device.
I don't know this driver, but I smell that the comment might actually be wrong or at least misleading - most likely no PHY reset is needed here but a MAC address needs to be programmed into the controller - which brings us back to the start of this discussion. [And note that you still might need this when you want to use the ethernet interface in Linux].
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk