[Help] Banana Pi USB Ethernet (smsc95xx) Fails to Initialize on Ubuntu

Software & Hardware:

  • Board: Banana Pi BPI-M4
  • OS: Ubuntu Mate 18.04
  • Kernel: Linux bpi-iot-ros-ai 4.9.119-BPI-M4-Kernel #6 SMP PREEMPT Tue Jun 18 10:49:05 CST 2019 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Connection Diagram:

Problem Description

USB Ethernet interface (eth1) failed to work.

pi@bpi-iot-ros-ai:~$ ip link show
5: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether 7a:97:3e:f5:46:ea brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
pi@bpi-iot-ros-ai:~$ dmesg | grep -i smsc
[ 8731.889314] smsc95xx 1-1.2:1.0 eth1: timeout on PHY Reset
[ 8731.889336] smsc95xx 1-1.2:1.0 eth1: Failed to init PHY
pi@bpi-iot-ros-ai:~$ sudo ip link set eth1 up
RTNETLINK answers: Input/output error

Troubleshooting Steps That I have Taken:

  1. Reloaded the driver (smsc95xx)
sudo modprobe -r smsc95xx
sudo modprobe smsc95xx
  1. Unbound & rebound the USB device
echo "1-1.4" | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind
sleep 2
echo "1-1.4" | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/bind

3.Reinstalled firmware

sudo apt install --reinstall linux-firmware
  1. Checked for voltage issues but nothing returned
dmesg | grep -i voltage