Raspberry Pi 4 with USB Ethernet

[Grifter]

I am a brand new user of OpenWrt, or trying to be. My setup:

• Raspberry Pi 4 hardware
• I used the Raspberry Pi installer to flash openwrt-24.10.5-bcm27xx-bcm2711-rpi-4-ext4-factory on to a micro sd card.
• My goal is to use OpenWrt as my router. I plan to use it for DHCP and firewall management but haven't gotten that far yet.
• I will use a Deco XE75 AXE5400 Mesh system in AP mode for wifi.
• The Raspberry Pi only has one ethernet port. I am planning on connecting that port to the ONT.
• Because of that one port I purchased a J5 Create USB to ethernet (model JUE30) adapter. The internet tells me that this is based on the AX88179B chipset. This would lead out of the Pi and connect to my main Deco router.

I've got some parts working.

• The device boots and I can ssh to it. This took a little doing in that I had to plug it directly into my laptop and move my laptop to it's local subnet initially.
• The GUI works and I can do various normal activities (installing packages, configuring things, etc.)

What totally doesn't work is the USB ethernet adapter. I installed the package for that particular chipset but it doesn't get set up as a network adapter. The issue sees to be something in the combination of the hardware and/or the OS because I plugged the adapter into my windows computer and it runs fine.

I've been troubleshooting this a lot with ChatGPT so below I've put a ChatGPT generated summary of some of the things I have looked at in the hopes that they might help solve this.

What Works

• OpenWrt boots and is fully reachable over the Pi’s built-in Ethernet port (eth0)
• USB subsystem is clearly functioning:
  • lsusb sees the dongle correctly
  • USB device is enumerated at 1-1.3
  • Kernel logs show the device appearing on the bus
• The AX88179 driver is loaded successfully

Example from lsmod:

ax88179_178a           24576  0
usbnet                 24576  1 ax88179_178a

Example from lsusb:

Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0b95:1790 ASIX AX88179B

Example from ls /sys/bus/usb/devices/ (showing the device is present):

1-1.3
1-1.3:2.0
1-1.3:2.1

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The Problem

Even though:

• The USB controller is working
• The AX88179 device is detected
• The ax88179_178a driver is loaded

OpenWrt never creates a network interface for the USB adapter.

ip link show always shows only:

lo
eth0   (built-in Pi port)
wlan0
br-lan

There is no eth1 and no usb0 — so the dongle cannot be assigned to WAN.

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Relevant Kernel Logs (dmesg / logread excerpts)

When plugging in the adapter:

usb 1-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=0b95, idProduct=1790, bcdDevice=2.00
usb 1-1.3: Product: AX88179B
usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: ASIX
usbcore: registered new interface driver ax88179_178a

But no lines ever appear indicating an interface registration such as eth1 or usb0.

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What I’ve Tried

I have already installed and confirmed:

kmod-usb-core
kmod-usb-net
kmod-usb-net-ax88179

I have also tried:

rmmod ax88179_178a usbnet
modprobe usbnet
modprobe ax88179_178a

…and rebooting — with no change.

Replugging the dongle is detected by USB, but still does not create a network interface.

As you can tell from my terminology and heavy use of ChatGPT I'm pretty new to this world, I'm hoping I'm missing something obvious that can get this running.

[frollic]

Asix USB NICs have issues with the RPi (or the other way around), use the forum search.

You will also need some extra kmods to get it detected - [solved] AX88179B not binding with kmod driver - #4 by frollic.

[Grifter]

Thank you very much, that appears to have solved it. I can now see the adapter as a network connector after installing kmod-usb-net-cdc-mbim. The lights are also on on the adapter, a first!

Thank you for your help and next time I will fall back on search instead of trying ChatGPT.