I know that the RaspberryPi cannot use netconsole due to the ethernet connector being driven over the USB bus, and thus not suporting polling (which is needed for netconsole).

 

When i look at my LePotato kernel (4.14.57), I see:

# CONFIG_NETCONSOLE is not set
# CONFIG_NETPOLL is not set
# CONFIG_NET_POLL_CONTROLLER is not set
 

So it is clear netconsole won't work as is.  Before I go through the process of building the kernel to enable these, I thought I'd check if I am wasting my time.  Is it expected that polling will work?  I don't know anything about the 'dwmac_meson8b' driver and what its capabilities might be...

 

See if your driver turns up in this list: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/search?q=CONFIG_NET_POLL_CONTROLLER&type=Code

I think the ethernet driver needs to explicitly support netpoll

 

Thanks.

I see it here:

drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/stmmac_main.c

 

whch is the same directory that dwmac-meson8b.c and if I'm reading the Makefile right,  it looks like that may be included in the meson8b driver.  I guess that is enough for me to go ahead and try the build and see how it goes.

So after rebuilding the kernel with:

CONFIG_NETCONSOLE=m
CONFIG_NETCONSOLE_DYNAMIC=y
 

I can confirm that netconsole does indeed work properly on my 'le potato'.  Is there a process to request that this config option be included in the default Armbian builds?  It will be annoying to need to rebuild my kernel manually forever more.

 

Edit: I opened a request since it seems kernel config changes are appropriate here: https://github.com/armbian/build/issues/1086

 

Are you the PhracturedBlue from deviationtx.com ?