Target bananapi_bpi-r4-common

[Philip Prindeville]

> On Jun 13, 2025, at 5:01 PM, Daniel Golle <daniel at makrotopia.org> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 04:03:37PM -0600, Philip Prindeville via openwrt-devel wrote:
>> 
>> Should the BPi-R4 be more richly provisioned?  It's got 4 or 8GB of DRAM so it's hardly a "skinny" platform.
> 
> I would leave that to the user and keep the default image with just what
> is necessary. Diverging and creating "rich" images for specific devices
> imho opens a can of worms which will require continous maintainance.
> How would we decide which packages to include? How would we draw the line
> for each and every board whether in our opinion the amount of flash and
> ram is enough for any particular feature, and why some features are
> present while others aren't?


Busybox has defaults that people are welcome to turn off.  Why not have something homologous for targets?


> Of course, the community is free to create and share such images, and for
> many devices (incl. the R4) there are community-made images, some built
> from source, some made with the ImageBuilder or using online tools like
> the OpenWrt Firmware Selector and asu.
> 
> However, we would not be able to maintain support for 2k devices if we
> would also have to maintain an individual package selection for all
> those devices which goes beyond offering minimal hardware support.
> 
>> 
>> Also, why are two different targets required for the same hardware?  I get that the "10G SFP WAN" and "2.5G/10G WAN" ports are combo so that only one PHY can be in use at a time, but why can't a single target support both and just detect which is connected?
> 
> There are two different boards variants:
> - 2x SFP+ cages and 4x 1GE RJ-45
> - 1x SFP+ cage, 1x 2.5GE RJ-45 and 4x 1GE RJ-45


> The 2.5GE PHY is built-into the SoC and apart from being populated
> differently the boards are identical, there is no way to detect in
> software which variant we are dealing with. SinoVoip equips the R4 with
> some I2C EEPROMs which would be perfectly suitable to be used to indicate
> the board variant or even contain a factory-assigned MAC address. Sadly
> they come all empty.


Well, it's EEPROM, so it can be reblown, right?


> Hence, as they are two distinct board variants and there is no way to
> detect the variant in software, we need two images.



> That's different from a "combo port" on devices where both, SFP cage and
> RJ-45 MDI are physically present but only one of them can be used at a
> time. On such boards the presence indicator (MODDEF0) of the SFP cage can
> be used to switch between the SFP cage and the RJ-45 port (which also
> isn't supported yet by vanilla Linux or OpenWrt, but it's still a
> different story and will be supported in future)


> 
>> Do we want to auto-select more packages like (say) mwan3 for instance?  I think we have enough memory that we could include it and if it's not used it's not the end of the world.
> 
> Apart from the argument above, it also simply isn't possible to include
> packages from the packages feed in images created by the phase1
> buildbot...


Don't know anything about that.  I do my own monolithic builds from scratch.  Don't use image-builder.


> 
>> I'd include:
>> 
>> lldpd
>> curl
>> 6in4 (or 6to4 or both?)
>> avahi
>> collectd
>> firewall3 (or firewall4)
>> hwclock
>> iftop
>> ip-full
>> iptasn & iptgeoip
>> ntp*
>> snmp
>> *swan
>> xfrm
>> zoneinfo
>> 
>> But that's me.  I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
>> 
>> Are there other BPi-R4 users that want to start a thread?
> 
> There are some threads on the forum you may want to join.


Yeah, probably.  I'll look for them.


>> 
>> Oh, one other question... I see there's a FPC connector for an extra LAN port (not clear if it's switched or not). Has anyone used that and what's the cable to make that work? Is there a knock-out machined into the case of an extra port?  And the diagram here:
>> 
>> https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-R4_Pro/BananaPi_BPI-R4_Pro
> 
> That's the R4 Pro, it's again a different board which isn't yet
> publicly available.


Oh, quite right.  Here's the "standard" board:

https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-R4/BananaPi_BPI-R4

And as you say, 10 GBE WAN (SFP), 1GBE WAN, 3x GBE switched.


> 
>> 
>> Says "PoE Module RT5400" but I can't find any info on that.  There's this:
>> 
>> https://www.amazon.com/youyeetoo-BPI-RT5400-Isolation-BPI-F2P-BPI-WiFi/dp/B0D61ZKFL6
>> 
>> But it doesn't include the BPi-R4 in the description.  Is it PD (my guess) or PI (for driving an external device)?
> 
> It's PD, and typically SinoVoip/BPi will make boards which include the
> PoE module, ie. you can order the board with or without PoE
> functionality.
> 


Okay, I already ordered the 8GB WayPonDev board on Amazon.