Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro Wifi7 Router board with Mediatek MT7988A, 8G RAM 8G eMMC, 4x2.5G and 2x10G network port

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4/BPI-R4 Pro(MT7988)
38

What for? Coming back and saying it is not working?

That sum of people is people who know a thing or two about hardware bringup.
I unfortunately always expect horrible mainline support from all board manufacturers so whenever i buy a board basically “nothing works”.

Please do not buy this board within the next 6 - 12 months

Any specific reason? Will there be revisions? I’m personally new to BPI so i don’t know how much they test their hardware but it would be a very awful experience if a board has a major hardware level flaw that cannot be fixed/improved either via software workarounds or minor hardware fixes.
But yes i agree, Maybe i should wait.

BPI will …

Do the same as all board manufacturers? Provide a known good vendor kernel/distro that was tested internally for all board features?

I appreciate your answers, Unfortunately after waiting for a while since seeing this board announced i became a little desperate to ask :smile:
Guess i’ll wait!
Thank you.

39

It will take some time for software support and hardware testing…we still need to get it basicly working first and upstreaming code to get mainline linux support.

We still hanging on R4 pro with pcs before we can upstream the 10G sfp part. But for R4 there is now basic network support (internal switch) in 6.18.

For R4 pro i should get my updated board this week and i hope bugs from earlier revision are fixed.

1 Like
40

Woo, Exciting!
I’m just hoping that once the board is released to the public it won’t have any major hardware flaws.
Also glad to hear that you guys are interested in upstreaming/mainline.

41

If all goes reasonably well, this board will break sales records. Once it has OpenWrt support, I’ll definitely buy one.

42

Agreed, I’m actually planning to buy 2. A friend of mine wants to improve his networking setup, I’ll gift him one of these. :smile:

43

honestly i like problems and that is why i buy dev boards …

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44

Presale?

45

Payment is required now, with shipment in 43 days.

46

As far as I understand, shielding the board remains just a dream?

47

I pre-ordered one. It’s annoying that neither heat sinks nor cases are currently available to order. I hope they will be available before shipping starts and can then perhaps be added on.

Are there any advantages to pre-ordering from BPI?

48

:see_no_evil: …

49

Hi, are there any news about this product and the new BE19 wifi card? Thank you

50

news here

51

How long does it usually take to have a version of OpenWrt for a new router board?

52

if its a “new new” board then this can take months (or even longer…), depending how much effort the company and the community is willing to spend. But this should be a quick thing, i assume only the .dtb must be modified as all chips are the same. Maybe @frank-w can say something about that.

53

if you need more 5G module support ,please see here:

54

I have the board bootable with my kernel,but the mxl switch (probed with daa ports but internal phys not recognized) and the 10g phys not yet working.

With sdk code the mxl switch including phys and the lan-10g phy is working.

2 Likes
55

Are you testing already the new R4 Pro with BE19? Do they fix BE14’s Wifi issues?

56

I have no actual be19 yet and wifi is later…first baseboard have to work so far. And i do not have professional lab to check for noise or such.I’m also no wifi expert,so i can try to get it basicly working but for specific things we need wifi experts…

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57

Thank you! I think we should wait late 2026 for new OpenWrt with Wifi7 support and hope the new BE19 will fix the noise problems