Rock Pi 4B+ with M.2 ethernet PCIE card

#1

Greetings,
I was looking to use the Rock Pi 4B+ with a Carte M2 M.2 NGFF optical fiber ethernet output card and a M.2 key adapter. Since the ethernet card uses WGI210AS as the conversion chip, which uses a PCIE lane V2.1 which seems to be the same version that Rock Pi uses, I was hopeful that it would work, which was not the case. I tested it on Debian 11, but detected no outwards communication from the Rock Pi 4.
While the Rock Pi 4B+ does not advertise compability with other PCIE devices, I found this forum post where Jack from Radxa Team mention that Ethernet PCIE cards should work.
So my question is, before I delve deeper into this problem, has anyone tried this and got some results?(Positive or negative)
Or was I wrong in the base assumption that this could work?
Any help would be appreciated.
Sincerely,
Harri

#2

Hi @Harri,
You can try to use the command sudo lspci -k to see if the network card is correctly recognized and whether the kernel driver is loaded

#3

Thank you for the suggestion, it seems the network card is recognized and the driver is loaded/used. The output I got is following:
00:00.0 PCI bridge: Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd RK3399 PCI Express Root Port
Kernel driver in use: pcieport
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Fiber Network Connection (rev 03)

Since I had to type it manually I hope there were no mistakes.
From this it seems to me like from the rockpi side everything works. I will test with other cables and if all else fails with an oscilloscope to see if there is communication. If the output tells You something more about the problem, let me know
I also tried connecting and disconnecting(While powered down) the adapter and the output for lspci changed from what I wrote to nothing. But if I tried the command ip a(Which should show me the connected network if I am not mistaken), nothing changed

#4

It looks like the card is recognized properly, but the log output you gave is missing the key information Kernel driver in use and Kernel modules entries, please post them.

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#5

Those three lines were the only things that were given to me by the “lspci -k” command.
The Kernel driver in use was just pcieport
And there was no information about the kernel modules entries

#6

Normally, these two contents will appear under each PCIE device. Please try this image：https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/download/25.2.0-trunk.124/Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.124_Rockpi-4bplus_bookworm_current_6.6.63_minimal.img.xz .It has a updated kernel that may contain the driver of i210.

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#7

I apologize for the late reply, had some troubles with SSH.
I finally managed to ssh into the minimal image and run the lspci-k command, but the output was very similar, with only the added ethernet connection I had to have this time:

00:00.0 PCI bridge: Rockchip Electronics Co., Ltd RK3399 PCI Express Root Port
        Kernel driver in use: pcieport
01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation I210 Gigabit Fiber Network Connection (rev 03)
        Kernel driver in use: igb

Do You think that manually installing the drivers could help with this? I saw that I210 has RPM drivers that could potentially be installed with Alien, and a make file type install, which I tried but couldn’t get to work yet.

#8

It seems that the driver is loaded normally, and you also get a network device, isn’t it?

#9

I connected the device to my router, but if I just use the optical fiber out(With a converter for regular CAT connection), I don’t see the device through my router. And the converter doesn’t register a connection on the fiber side.