Running Devuan Ascii on a Raspberry Pi 3B+, on most boots the boot process pauses for a minute or so after printing "DHCPDISCOVER...", apparently because the dhclient program gets stuck. After waiting for the machine to finish booting, it's necessary to do "sudo ifdown eth0" then "sudo ifup eth0" to bring up the interface. This is with an Ethernet cable plugged in to the built-in RJ45 jack.
I posted the question On Dev1Galaxy and got back answers telling me to put "auto eth0" and "iface eth0 inet dhcp" in /etc/network/interfaces, which I already had. With an X86_64 machine also running Devuan Ascii, using the same Ethernet cable, same switch/router port, and such, those lines work well, with no pausing during boot.
The kernel claims to be "4.16.14-v8+", according to uname. Doing "lshw" shows this for the NIC (modulo line wrap):
*-network:1 description: Ethernet interface physical id: 2 logical name: eth0 serial: b8:27:eb:5f:71:2c size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s capabilities: ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=lan78xx driverversion=1.0.6 duplex=full ip=192.168.5.151 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s Poking around /sys, I found this entry for the device's driver:lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Feb 18 21:06 /sys/devices/virtual/mdio_bus/usb-001:006/usb-001:006:01/driver -> ../../../../../bus/mdio_bus/drivers/Microchip LAN88xx
Watching the LEDs on the RJ45 jack while the machine boots, I have noticed that the green LED on the left does not come on and stay on until after the "DHCPDISCOVER..." line has printed on the console. The yellow/amber LED on the right blinks a couple of times before than then a couple of times after the "DHCPDISCOVER..." line prints.
On the Raspberry Pi, is there a kernel module that needs to be mentioned in /etc/modprobe-something to get the hardware/firmware/driver ready in time for dhclient?
On one of those times when the boot process did not hang, and after manually bringing up the interface successfully, "lsmod" does not show any kernel module with "lan78" or "lan88" its name.
Thanks.