No ethernet devices in x86

[navy8954]

Hello, thanks for your reply.

@slh

The x86_64 images have the kernel modules for the most common ethernet cards pre-installed, but anything more exotic might need installing (imagebuilder/ online-imagebuilder can help with that, once you know what's to be added) - or packaging (from the mainline kernel), in case of more rare stuff.

In contrast to OpenWrt, a typical general purpose linux distribution has a lot more (~everything imaginable) preinstalled, making this easier to debug - so run a live linux USB stick of your favourite distribution and run lspci -knn there, to find out what you need. While there are other approaches to debug this from plain-OpenWrt, without any detours to other linux distributions, this tends to be the quickest and easiest.

You were right, the problem was that the driver for these specific Ethernet ports were not installed by default on OpenWRT. So I did a little search and used lspci on my live USB and found out that I need to install kmod-sky2 and it worked.
I'm leaving this reply and this link here for anyone in the future who may have a similar problem.
I followed instructions from this post to find the kmod package that I needed: Ethernet ports not functioning x86 - #8 by NC1

Also, I appreciate your concerns about power usage and I carefully read your comments about getting a newer device. I'm just experimenting with OpenWRT and checking if it is a viable solution for my problem; so using my old PC as a router is a temporary measure, I'm intending to purchase a new device (perhaps a modem+router) in the future.

Thanks again for your time, it helped a lot.