adventures with my imx53 quickstart board
Recently my imx53 quickstart board (r model) dissapeared off my network.
The board usually runs debian wheezy from a hard drive but it also has a
freescale supplied copy of ubuntu lucid (with a freescale kernel) on a
micro SD card which I occasionally boot to use as a recovery system.
Since I'd forgotten the root password for the debian system (I ususually
use ssh with key based auth) I booted into the ubuntu system to perform
a password reset. While in this system I also discovered networking was
working.
After resetting the root password I booted back into the debian system
and established that the network device claimed to be up but no packets
got through and I periodically got the error message "[ 77.211021] FEC
ENET: rcv is not +last" (time obviously varied) on the console.
I tried updating the kernel to the latest version from wheezy but that
didn't change anything. So I then tried the kernel from experimental
which wouldn't boot at all. So I restored the old debian wheezy kernel I
started with (I had a conviniant backup of the uImage and uInitrd for it
that I made before I started messing arround), networking remained broken.
I then discovered that the reported link speed in both the debian and
ubuntu systems was only 10mbps (should be 100). At this point I decided
to power cycle the network switch (a cheap unmanaged switch with no
recognisable brand) and ubuntu reconnected at 100mbps. I then rebooted
into debian and networking worked again.
I then re-upgraded to the lasted wheezy kernel, networking continued to
work.
So now onto the conclusions from this adventure
1: with the debian wheezy kernel network operation at 10mbps seems to be
broken.
2: the debian experimental kernel doesn't want to boot at all
3: cheap network switches work fine most of the time but can do really
strange shit from time to time.
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