I'm trying to get this rockpro64 board to boot off of pxe/nfs.    I'm able to get it to boot into armbian and to the point where it asks for the new root password.  But something happens on the device where the network gets disabled which stops the NFS connectivity and the rest of the system with it.  All traffic stops on the device and it becomes unreachable.  NFS traffic stops, it no longer responds to pings, etc.

 

It's not entirely frozen, for example it prints kernel messages to console if the ethernet is pulled.  And after a few minutes the nfs connection times out and it starts printing this over and over.

Quote

[  318.457644] nfs: server 192.168.116.1 not responding, still trying...  

 

It always happens about 75 seconds after boot.  It leads me to think there's some job or process that's running on the base OS install that somehow interrupts the connection. 

 

this is the pxe config file I'm using.  and I'm using the current bullseye server image from Aug 31, 2022

 

default l0
menu title U-Boot menu
prompt 0
timeout 50

label 10
        menu default
        kernel root/boot/Image
        fdt root/boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3399-rockpro64.dtb
        initrd root/boot/uInitrd
        append loglevel=8 root=/dev/nfs ip=dhcp rootwait rw earlyprintk nfsroot=192.168.116.1:/rockpro64/root

 

So I figured it out yesterday but I wasn't allowed to post until today 😑

 

My hunch was correct and NetworkManager was doing something to the interface.  I'm not sure exactly what, but once I excluded the interface from NM, all was fine.

 

Since I have direct control over the root fs, all I had to do was open up /etc/networkmanager/networkmanger.conf and add a line like this.  ofc sub in the correct interface mac address

[keyfile]
unmanaged-devices=mac:f2:b7:0b:2f:07:d2

 

Also, while I'm typing this out.  I initially used the sigmaris uboot for spi, but it didn't work well at all.  the ethernet was constantly timing out and I couldn't successfully pull the kernel images via tftp.  but the ayufan uboot worked much better.