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. 

# From the initrd:
devmem 0x70000004 32 0x43075

# From Debian
busybox devmem 0x70000004 32 0x43075

This will disable the link speed auto-negotiation and force the PHY to communicate at 10Mb/s. This only works in cases where the link is up all the time. If link is being connected/disconnected you would need to reset the interface (ifdown && ifup) and run the devmem command again.

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