TS-75XX errata cavium link loss

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Synopsis Link drop with certain cable lengths/switches on 100Mb/s networks
Severity Normal
Class Kernel Bug
Affected All TS-75XX/TS-4500 Boards
Status Workarounds available

Description:

The Cavium STR8100 integrated PHY in some circumstances can drop connection to the network. You can see this in dmesg as: 

 star_nic_shutdown: stoping patch check.

The issue appears to correspond to the length of cable used as well as the network device connected to the board.

Workaround:

You can force the cavium PHY to 10MB/s which drastically improves reliability, and in most cases eliminates the issue. This needs to be run each time the interface is brought back up. If link is lost you would need to reset the interface (ifconfig eth0 up && ifconfig eth0 down) and run the devmem command again. 

# From the initrd:
devmem 0x70000004 32 0x43075

# From Debian
/initrd/bin/busybox devmem 0x70000004 32 0x43075

This will disable the link speed auto-negotiation and force the PHY to communicate at 10Mb/s.

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