Repeatedly getting "Link is Up / Link is Down" with L3.0.35-4.0.0 Kernel

[DonaldR_PooleJr]

Hello All,

I have 2 Boundary Devices SABRE Lite boards with the latest and greatest Freescale L3.0.35_4.0.0 kernel installed on both.  But, I'm having a problem establishing network connectivity on one of my boards because it keeps reporting "Link is up" and then "Link is down" (i've tried switching out ethernet cables and checking the switch that the devices a plugged into to make sure it was working).  It eventually stops reporting "Links is up" and "Link is down" after some time, with a "MDIO read timeout mii_id=6" error within the system log.  Here are two things that I notice when comparing the 2 boards:

• The board that does not exhibit the "Link is up" / "Link is down" issue has it's networking interface configured as eth0
• The board the does exhibit the "Link is up" / "Link is down" issue has it's network interface configured as eth1

I did google this issue and found that others were having this issue 1-2 years ago on the Freescale 2.6.35 kernel, but patches were created/submitted and the problem resolved.  I looked at some of the patches to see if I could apply them, but a lot has changed in the kernel since 2.6.35 and 3.0.35. So I didn't bother.

Has anyone else experience this issue on this device with the latest Freescale kernel?  Could this possibly be a regression?  Any insight and/or guidance would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

[DonaldR_PooleJr]

Hello Eric,

I grab the Debian image from here:

http://rcn-ee.net/deb/minfs/wheezy/debian-7.0.0-minimal-armhf-2013-05-05.tar.xz

I was following Robert C. Nelson's guide to installing Debian on the SABRE Lite board:

i.MX6x SABRE Lite - Linux on ARM - eewiki

I'll go and grab the Debian ARM hard-float image from the link provided and see if I still experience the issue.  Maybe Robert's rootfs is different is some regard.

[DonaldR_PooleJr]

Eric,

Here is the pastebin of my syslog that is showing the problem. For some reason this time, it didn't continue indefinitely.  It finally somehow established a link.

[EricNelson]

Rats. This doesn't show anything meaningful.

[DonaldR_PooleJr]

Yeah, I didn't see anything useful either.  If it helps, the interface does eventually stop repeatedly reporting "Link is up" / "Link is down" in the syslog and come up and stay up.  It's very strange any only happens on one of my SABRE Lite boards.