no ether-mac when running L4T 28.1 with specified FDT in extlinux.conf

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson TX2
1

Hello Team,

I’ve updated my Jetson TX2 with Jetpack 3.1.
Booting normally I have ethernet.
But if I specify another dtb file with FDT inside extlinux.conf I get these messages and no eth0 device is available.

nvidia@nvidia-7365:~$ dmesg | egrep -i ‘(ether|inet|network|igb)’
[ 0.245018] iommu: Adding device 2490000.ether_qos to group 18
[ 2.832919] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 3.2.6-k
[ 2.846231] igb: Intel(R) Gigabit Ethernet Network Driver - version 5.3.0-k
[ 2.853945] igb: Copyright (c) 2007-2014 Intel Corporation.
[ 2.864504] eqos_get_mac_address_dtb: bad mac address at /chosen/nvidia,ether-mac: null.
[ 2.864506] ether-mac read from DT failed -99
[ 2.926704] usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether

Here a snippet of my extlinux.conf

TIMEOUT 30
DEFAULT primary

MENU TITLE p2771-0000 eMMC boot options

LABEL primary
      MENU LABEL primary kernel
      LINUX /boot/Image
      APPEND ${cbootargs} root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext4

LABEL primary3
      MENU LABEL primary kernel with explicit dtb
      LINUX /boot/Image
      FDT /boot/tegra186-quill-p3310-1000-c03-00-base.dtb
      APPEND ${cbootargs} root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext4

LABEL primary4
      MENU LABEL primary kernel with explicit dtb2
      LINUX /boot/Image
      FDT /boot/dtb/tegra186-quill-p3310-1000-c03-00-base.dtb
      APPEND ${cbootargs} root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext4

Both DTBs were the ones originally delivered with the system. So I assume only the one already loaded by u-Boot from a location I don’t know has the right /chosen/ether-mac node.

I’m confused that no one else has this issue as it makes changing the Device Tree impossible.
Thanks in advance!

2

I just have noticed that not only chosen/ether-mac is affected.
The whole node seems to be unexpectedly empty:

[    0.145859] chosen/plugin-manager does'nt have ids, nct and odm-data
[    2.864504] eqos_get_mac_address_dtb: bad mac address at /chosen/nvidia,ether-mac: null.
[   10.796715] wifi_get_mac_address_dtb: bad mac address at /chosen/nvidia,wifi-mac: null.

This now also explains why I don’t have any video devices available as the fragments of the plugin-manager are not working.

3

Ok, my search words weren’t as good.
I’ve read this article [url]Jetson/TX2 DTB - eLinux.org and now I’m aware that DTBs can only be loaded via U-Boot.

If I’m correct this case can be closed…

If there is still a way to use extlinux.conf for that please tell me.
I really need a way to support multiple base boards for the TX2. This seems to be rather confusing to use especially as our custom base board doesn’t have recovery support.

4

The method of naming the dtb differs in R28.1 (from what I can tell this was so that both the TX1 and TX2 could use the same rootfs and unify parts of their install). See:
[url]https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1020708/jetson-tx2/method-to-modify-use-different-device-tree-in-r28-1/post/5195927/#5195927[/url]

The gist is that the boot environment now contains the DTB in a hidden partition. Part of this is visible via the extlinux.conf entry (the rootfs), but most seems to be ignored if edited in extlinux.conf.