Subject: The chosen driver for ethernet being incorrect in Alpine ISO on Amlogic A311D

From: Farooq Karimi Zadeh <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2025 21:51:10 +0330

Hello.

I've got a Libre Computer Alta. As I boot the aarch64 standard ISO using 
USB on the board and try to use

the ethernet device, the network device doesn't work.

If I boot something like NixOS or Debian on it, Ethernet just works 
fine. Also after I install Alpine on it and use `eudev` as the device 
manager, it also works fine. The difference I've found is the driver 
chosen is `stmmac` instead of `meson8b-dwmac`.

It seems that `mdev` is responsible for choosing drivers. Am I right? I 
needed some hints to write and send a patch.

Please don't give me fish, instead teach me how to fish. The first step 
is that how should I realize who is responsible for managing device 
drivers in Linux/Alpine.

Thanks in advance,

Farooq.

---

From: "Laurent Bercot" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:23:52 +0000

>It seems that `mdev` is responsible for choosing drivers. Am I right? I needed some hints to write and send a patch.
>
>Please don't give me fish, instead teach me how to fish. The first step is that how should I realize who is responsible for managing device drivers in Linux/Alpine.

  By default, it is mdev, yes. You can select what device manager you
use by running /usr/sbin/setup-devd. You can keep using eudev with
Alpine if it works for you.

  If you use mdev or mdevd, the file that configures their behaviour
is /etc/mdev.conf, but that's not what explains that they would choose
another driver than what eudev would. For that, some investigation into
the uevent itself, and the udev rules, would be necessary. It's possible
that eudev has an exception coded that chooses a different driver than
what the uevent would naturally say.

--
  Laurent

---

From: Farooq Karimi Zadeh <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2025 23:05:18 +0330

On 12/5/25 22:53, Laurent Bercot wrote:
>> It seems that `mdev` is responsible for choosing drivers. Am I right? 
>> I needed some hints to write and send a patch.
>>
>> Please don't give me fish, instead teach me how to fish. The first 
>> step is that how should I realize who is responsible for managing 
>> device drivers in Linux/Alpine.
>
Thanks. I got good clues!

Where can I read about overall architecture of Alpine?

There is https://docs.alpinelinux.org but I can't find much in it.

In general, when I have a question about Alpine internals, how do

I find me answer instead of asking directly from people?

Best Regards,

Farooq.

---

From: Will Sinatra <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2025 18:22:44 -0500

We're working to revamp the official documentation, it's part of our 3.24
release milestone.

The wiki is currently a good resource for this, it's entirely community
driven, so if you see something is missing and are actively figuring it out
contributing an article is a huge help! You can access that here:
https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Main_Page

Of course there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking for help here or on
IRC! IRC tends to be the fastest way to get help in my experience.