OTG Ethernet

emieza

Hello! I am trying to adapt an application for UBports (on a BQ Aquarius E4.5) that needs to use an OTG Ethernet adapter. I have tried with 3 brands with same result: an lsusb shows the device, but no new network interface appears in an ifconfig -a command.

On the other hand, the same 3 OTG Ethernet devices do work perfectly in an Ubuntu 16.04 box in desktop environment, and create the interface and immediately get connectivity from DHCP server.

/var/log/syslog shows that:

Jun 24 20:57:25 ubuntu-phablet kernel: [ 1282.448276][USBPHY]slew calibration:FM_OUT =334,x=4120,value=4
Jun 24 20:57:26 ubuntu-phablet kernel: [ 1283.027235]usb 1-1: new full-speed USB device number 4 using musb-hdrc

And an lsusb in one of the devices:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ lsusb 
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0fe6:9700 Kontron (Industrial Computer Source / ICS Advent) DM9601 Fast Ethernet Adapter
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

My UBports version:

Welcome to Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.4.67 armv7l)

Maybe I should create the network interface manually or add some drivers to the system?
Any clues on what to look into next?

Thanks in advance!! _()_

doniks

I'm not sure, but it might require a driver that's not present on the bq e4.5 .

In order to fix that one would firstly require the ability to compile a new kernel, but the kernel sources for this device are not publicly available, so might be the e4.5 is a no-go.

On other devices that originally came with Android where the sources are available, it would be conceivable that the driver can be enabled with a recompiled kernel. But if the driver is not yet present in a working state in those sources (since Android manufacturers didn't care about enabling (not breaking) this driver), then you would be looking at a non-trivial task of enabling/backporting the driver.

On the pinephone your chances should be much higher to get this working since it is using a recent, almost-upstream kernel. But just to not to skip any bit of my half knowledge: on the brave heart edition of the pine phone there is some hardware issue related to OTG, which may or may not affect the ability to drive an OTG Ethernet adapter (see two forum posts in pine64 forum)

dobey

@doniks said in OTG Ethernet:

In order to fix that one would firstly require the ability to compile a new kernel, but the kernel sources for this device are not publicly available, so might be the e4.5 is a no-go.

Yes they are. They must be, otherwise UT would not run on it. It's at https://github.com/ubports/kernel_krillin

dobey

@emieza said in OTG Ethernet:

Hello! I am trying to adapt an application for UBports (on a BQ Aquarius E4.5) that needs to use an OTG Ethernet adapter.

Why does an application care about the method of access to the network?

doniks

@dobey said in OTG Ethernet:

@doniks said in OTG Ethernet:

In order to fix that one would firstly require the ability to compile a new kernel, but the kernel sources for this device are not publicly available, so might be the e4.5 is a no-go.

Yes they are. They must be, otherwise UT would not run on it. It's at https://github.com/ubports/kernel_krillin

ohhh. i didnt know! i thought bq provided a binary kernel. now I see not only krillin, also arale, vegatahd, bq m 10 and turbo kernel sources are there. do we also have sources for the android layer for these devices?

dobey

@doniks No, the device/vendor part is not published to github by BQ or MediaTek unfortunately. It's why these devices are still using a very old recovery image build.