A touch of bravery got me to install mainline on my Nanopi Neo using the orangepi one dtb.  It worked OK.  Today I updated the system and got a nice new kernel 4.9.4 but also had bit of bother in the form of the absence of network devices.

 

It seems there is an issue with the new sun8i-h3-nanopineo.dtb as reverting back to the orangepi one restores that capability.

 

It's all a bit mysterious to me but I do notice that the alias "ethernet0" is absent from the nanopi dts and the configuration of ethernet further down seems quite different.

 

I'd be quite interested in trying a new version of the dtb if someone's ahead of me with this.

 

 

I got the latest sun8i-h3-nanopineo.dts from kernel.org 4.8.9 and it's different but it still has the same problem - no ethernet (eth0) device.

H3 is not yet fully mainlined. We don't use main branch, but development (as stated at download page: Images were built from developement branch.). Nanopi neo from download section has working Ethernet. Tested.

 

BTW: update will fail to bring Ethernet ATM.

> BTW: update will fail to bring Ethernet ATM.

 

I think that's what's happened.    Curiously DietPi uses what seems to be the same kernel (4.9.4), same config etc but network works.

 

Also on DietPi all cpus are seen whereas on armbian dev only one is seen.

 

I wonder what's different?

I wonder what's different?

 

If you are doing upgrade, it can't work properly. It was clarified in another post - since you also need more recent boot script and DTB which is in repository doesn't have Ethernet enabled. It's only present in download image where you will have network + all cores and further upgrades will work. Remember, it's still developing kernel, which need further testing - there are bugs and limitations.