Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro smart router board with Rockchip RK3568 chip

Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro Opensource smart router board with Rockchip RK3568 chip

Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro is the next generation smart router developement board from Banana Pi in 2021. It is powered by Rockchip RK 3568 processor.Onboard 2GB LPDDR4 memory and 16GB eMMC storage, and supports 2 USB 3.0 interface, 5 gigabit network port. M.2 key-E and mini PCIe interface, 2 mipi DSI interface(one can change to LVDS by software), 1 CSI camera interface,1 HDMI output,

BPI-R2 Pro same size as Banana Pi BPI-R2, and interface is also same .so can use BPI-R2 case.

  • Rockchip RK3568 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 CPU
  • Mali-G52 1-Core-2EE
  • 2G LPDDR4 SDRAM (option 4G)
  • Mini PCIE interface and M.2 key-e interface
  • support 1 SATA interface
  • MicroSD slot supports up to 256GB expansion
  • 16G eMMC flash (option 16/32/64G)
  • 2 MIPI display interface support
  • 1 CSI camera interface
  • 5 port 10/100/1000 Mb Ethernet port
  • (2) USB 3.0 and (1) USB 2.0 otg port

Hardware interface:

BananaPi BPI-R2 PRO Unboxing & Overview (OpenWRT/Android/Linux)

BPI-R2 wiki online document , we will keeping update :

http://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R2_Pro

3 Likes

Wow thats a good SOC. RK3568 support already queued for next linux release and Bsd already have boot function :smiley: RK3568 already have 2 GMAC for onboard Gb Lan

Damn you used RK809-5 for pmic, Which chip is used for the switch controller?

Is wifi on board? Else with only 1 pcie we need a dbdc card again.

Which parts of soc are in next? I giess it’s only basic support, so most functions were missing.

No need for this as the chip they would use will be hard to get linux or bsd support for, pcie one would be much better. RK3568 have Pcie3 2lanes though.

ofcourse to begin with, atleast it can boot and have support for usb,pcie, gmac, iommu, gpio and pmu.

Details can be found here for quartz64, it is a collaboration with independent developer and collabora employee. It will be fully supported within months. Hdmi support is being worked on recently vop2 was written, atf is still missing as rockchip have to release it sometime soon.

But this has still only 1 pcie slot.afair m2 cannot be used as it is for sata only. I wonder why going from mtk to rockchip (maybe it’s cheaper)…mtk does good work for supporting hardware (except the mt6625l wifi).

Second gmac needs dsa patches not yet acklowledged in mainstream

You mean upstream process? I doubt that :frowning: We still dont have a fully functional R2 router os ready yet. You’re working for it which is great but having better mtk support would have made it so much better.

Yes I have seen ads of Firefly Station P2 which have dual gmac lan and the kernel developer already have the device to write the patch for it. Lets see when all this will be up-streamed. I have the devkits for RK3566 and RK3568 everyone is using rk809 pmic except for quartz64 which is using rk817.

the only problem is the mt6625l wifi driver on current R2.

otg (at least host-mode) seems to work too, but i don’t get the roleswitch working.

i have second gmac Patches in my 5.10-gmac tree

which else is missing?

1 Like

Great work, Looks like you have been doing all the work all alone for R2. I have been following your work since the time I received my device. I admire your dedication toward R2 :slight_smile:

HNat is stable now ?

What about upstreaming your work ?

I doubt that this driver will ever be fixed. MediaTek considers the MT7623-SoC family EOL. While many of their newer WiFi chips are supported by the mt76 driver and MediaTek devs contribute a lot there, I don’t think that MT6625L is anywhere on their ToDo list. There is a driver for the MT7663S SDIO 802.11ac WiFi chip which potentially could share some design properties with that older MT6625L, but I haven’t looked into it at all.

However, the R2 with MT7623N is still very interesting hardware, as you can still see in many corners that a lot was inherited from smartphone/tablet designs which now “pretend to be a network processor”. So it’s an interesting piece of industrial history and also provides a bit of a bridge for OpenWrt devs into the world of 32-bit MediaTek smartphone SoCs which is an interesting aspect for recycling/reuse of millions of under-powered (in terms of current Android needs) smartphones and tablets…

right, i have a working driver in 5.14, but it’s too huge and buggy to be upstreamed. no MTK dev will ever try to rewrite it and there is no documentation about this chip to write a new driver.

there is no much work not yet upstreamed for r2 (except mt6625l and second gmac). for otg i try to get the roleswitch working before posting anything (i see a response on plugging in, but hostmode seems not to be fully enabled, works with dr_mode=host but not “otg”).

hnat is already upstreamed (afaik 5.12…5.10 was a backport by me), hnat is working so far, no crashes, but i experienced some kind of connection limiting (looks like this) so currently i have it disabled via nft ruleset in my production router.

Any information on network acceleration?

RockChip’s GMACs are derived Synopsys DesignWare (dwmac / stmmac driver in Linux), that allows for supporting some offloading features (typically RX/TX TCP checksum offload, ie. stuff which is useful to accelerate for client/server applications, but no so useful in a forwarding setup).

From the traces it looks like WAN isn’t connected to the switch but to a dedicated PHY, probably directly hooked to one of the GMACs of the SoC. That kinda means that all WAN<->LAN traffic has to pass through SoC’s GMACs.

Would still be nice to know the switch IC used (RealTek RTL8368MB or MediaTek MT753x I would guess from specs and the QFP176 package size, but that’s just me guessing)

2 Likes

Just popped in to say that this is a great idea and I really want it :slight_smile: Trying to figure out whether it will be possible to use both the mPCIe and M.2 at the same time or if they share lanes?

2 Likes

@sinovoip @frank-w

Frank, first of all thank you for all your work on the original R2, you did more work than BPI itself assuming you’re not a BPI employee, they should pay you if they’re not doing it already :slight_smile:

I share your love for Mediatek Chios and BPI-R2, it’s a good board, Mediatek SoCs are great and well supported, I think Rockchip will offer good support too. We absolutely need full OpenWrt support on the new board for sure, it will be exciting. I’ll be glad if the new board does not have onboard wifi, it’s a waste of money, is a waste when it gets outdated and you have to use mPCIe card anyways (applies to both R2 and R64, useless onboard wifi), above all getting FCC certification gets very expensive as then you need to have the entire board certified (certificate of conformity issued by BPI doesn’t work for onboard wifi, and you can’t use onboard wifi without an FCC ID if you want to use these boards in a commercial product), Compex Wifi boards for example, are precertified. BPI certificate of conformity is good if the board doesn’t use onboard wifi.

Why naming it R2 (Pro)? It is different Soc and different hardware-layout (m2 slot,no wifi). Imho R3 will be a better name as it is a completely new board not compatible with R2.

Onboard wifi is not necessary, as wifi standards changing fast and so user can choose which card to use. But with only 1 pcie (afaik m2 cannot be used as pcie for wifi) you need to use a card with dbdc or use usb if user wants dualband (2G4/5G) support.

At a guess, It’s because the case footprint is the same. I know, dumb logic, especially considering the case is the cheapest part of this. I was thinking of R2 as a form factor or application (R for Router).

hi

for me , only when run FreeBSD and , or OpenBSD , maybe vyos aswell.

then it is intresting.

Holger

Any info on the release date?

@sinovoip do you have any defconfig/kernel repo? I looked into source and dts…seems like most parts are included by ARCH_ROCKCHIP,only some phy and clk are need extra config options.

Which switch is used?

Seems like uboot support is there too (at least patches available): https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg39211.html