Gem.e000b000 Waiting for PHY auto negotiation to complete......... TIMEOUT?

Question

The u-boot prints these before launching the kernel

Gem.e000b000 Waiting for PHY auto negotiation to complete......... TIMEOUT !
BOOTP broadcast 1
BOOTP broadcast 2
BOOTP broadcast 3
BOOTP broadcast 4
BOOTP broadcast 5
Retry count exceeded; 

Is there any way I can bypass this auto negotiation ? The bootdelay is 0, so I will not have any access in a running system,so I will like to modify this in a the source code.

Solution

I am not familiar with your particular target (Xilinx/Zynq?)

It looks like the target ethernet is not plugged in to a working network. There are two signs there, 1) PHY auto negotiation TIMEOUT, 2) your bootcmd includes dhcp or bootp to get a dynamic ip address for ethernet. These should both be controlled by environment variable settings.

It is usually easy to modify environment variables at runtime, either at u-boot command prompt or with linux utility fw_setenv. Usually it is more difficult to change/build source, then update the u-boot program code.

If you don't need working ethernet, it should be possible to change your bootcmd environment variable (remove ethernet-related commands such as bootp). And for PHY, check documentation of your target u-boot version, it should tell something (e.g. delete ethact environment variable).