Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 22:20:13 +0200 From: Urs Schulz uboot@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.