Sometimes, one simply stumbles upon an answer. Checking the Olimex
forums I came afross this thread:

https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=5839.0

the final reply by one of the Olimex employees (I presume) says thus:

The new controller has an extra pin called ETXERR, which is connected to
processor's pin C13 (PA17). When ETXERR is in high position it means
error. This line is pulled-up and this indicates error, the problem is
that the current drivers doesn't take care of ETXERR and until a better
driver gets available you'd need to set ETXERR to low position manually.

There is an easy workaround to enable the new Ethernet controller in
Armbian. Just set GPIO 17 to low position:

echo 17 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo out > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/direction
echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value

You can edit the dtb dts definitions so that GPIO gets set to low
position each time in your image. If you don't know how to edit the dtb
dts file you can put the above three lines of code in local.rc file or
other start-up script so they would execute automatically on reboot.


I just booted the Devuan Jessie image, manually applied those commands,
ran 'ifdown eth0' then 'ifup eth0' and it worky! I can ping, SSH into
the box, and use apt-get. Now I just need to get those parameters set
before networking is started.

Hope this helps someone else.

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

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