Banana Pi M4 Berry - Ethernet Link Negotiation Failure on Legacy Kernel [Fixed]

Hello,

I am experiencing a persistent Ethernet issue with the official legacy image (Bananapi-Armbian_24.8.2_Bpi-m4berry_bookworm_legacy_5.4.125). After extensive troubleshooting, the core issue has been identified:

The device fails to get an IPv4 address. The NetworkManager log (journalctl) consistently shows a set-link: unable to retrieve link negotiation warning, followed by a DHCP timeout. This points to a physical layer/driver issue.

Attempts to manually set the link speed via ethtool fail with Operation not supported , indicating that the sunxi_geth driver in this kernel is incomplete and lacks basic control functions.

The “trunk” images linked on the download page are mislabeled and also point to the same problematic legacy kernel.

Is the community aware of this driver issue? Is there any known kernel parameter, patch, or alternative community build that resolves the sunxi_geth link negotiation problem on the M4 Berry?

Finally, found this repo https://armbian.atomonetworks.com/

There are plenty of images

https://armbian.atomonetworks.com/dl/bananapim4berry/archive/

I use the latest trixie one, and the Ethernet works fine.

Rather use Download - Armbian as there are other places where images are. Here you could only found latest stable.