Banana Pi BPI-R4 Wifi 7 router board with MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880),4G RAM and 8G eMMC

Wifi7 spec is not finalised yet , and not many devices around, so relax still a year away, people haven’t move to wifi6e yet :slight_smile: .

I got multiple PPEs to work, one for each GMAC. I forgot that mtk_gdm_config only called once, that’s why it didn’t work at first. the patch is a huge mess, i’ll split it and clean up tomorrow filogic: fix multiple PPEs, add RSS+LRO · eladwf/openwrt@78aa8d5 · GitHub

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I had these errors before 4g ram support was added to switch driver.

Try limiting ram to 3G (kernel cmdline) and test again

Nice,have you tried getting 10g throughput with lro enabled over one of the sfp slots?

LRO still doesn’t work for me.

@dangowrt I’m assuming we’re not event at the point yet for any 6 Ghz testing with your build on the R4? I’ve been messing around with different packages/configs with a 7916 module but no luck yet.

I have been using 2 R4 running the code from the WIP on github with one AsiaRF MT7916 card each on 6GHz and achieved stable performance of ~1.5Gbps across the table (also tested the same setup with one AX210 card as client on the R4 and worked perfectly but slightly lower performance of ~1.2Gbps and a Pixel 7 also with similar results).

Was there any configs/packages you needed to configure to get it working on that build? I can’t get 6ghz enabled

Besides the kernel modules for the card itself, the only thing needed was to pick a regulatory domain which permits 6GHz channels and i could select 5GHz vs 6GHz in the UI.

I was building on fedora 39 asahi. I had to remove KERNEL_VARS and BUILD_LOGGER_VARS from kernel.mk and package-defaults.mk.

If anyone is interested, I added the r4 support from bpi repo on top of latest MTK release Filogic 880 WiFi7 Non-MLO SDK Release (20240112)

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Hi everyone, is there any information when WiFi 7 NIC card will be available for the BPI-R4 ? if it is already available , where can I buy it?

Hello Valentin,

no, it is not jet released. But releasing the Hardware does not mean, that it will work! This is not how this works …

where can I buy it (for the future):

→ look on aliexpress.

→ Are you in germany? → Look on Joom.

Best regards!

Hello Michael, I’ m pretty aware of that, and not expecting the NIC to work out of the box, or even work at all. I don’t mind fiddling weeks building drivers. But the BPI-R4 is limited without WiFi hardware , so I wonder when it will be available…

I’ve already ordered the main board from the AliExpress

Simply put other wifi cards in the slots, you can simply add a ac + ax card as a temp solution. That’s how I’m doing it: simply put the 2 wifi cards of my bpi r64 in the minipcie slots

:+1: Thats good.

I did not find any timetable (For the whole router parts … nic, case and fan’s). For me it i not clear which development state all the components have. Reliability tests for consumer products lasts usually 1000 houers (heat, humitity …) = 40 days. Mass production also needs time. I find no information which says anything about the actual state of the board.

Thee are other NIC chats you now?:

As “jpsollie” sayed: There are wifi 6 cards. And I think about not buying any NIC Board :dizzy_face:. The best solution is the solution that matches your needs. Why not take in the future a “normal” wifi 7 card from mediathek? Banana PI gives us the freedom to choose. I would like to have this freedom for the RAM :slightly_smiling_face:.

I think a good solution would be using an existing AP or your actual router.

I actually thought about that, but with common mpciex cards you will get only 2r2t mimo and wifi 6e card selection is pretty limited, basically Intel’s ax210 and I actually want to explore 6gHz band , because it is pretty empty ATM Another route is to explore set of be200 card with m2 to mpciex adapter , but you will get same story for channel allocation

I don’t mind to wait some time to unleash full potential of wife 7

Waiting sounds good :+1:

You have to be carefull with Intel !!! The Wifi boards do not support AP Mode. Some in this forum fall in the trap :neutral_face:.

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They do if it’s not 6GHz or you override the poorly implemented (and wrong) software regulatory enforcement. But there are better options indeed.

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I know this trap , they always had poor software support for STA modes , so I didn’t considered Intel as a goto option. Event if it will run in STA mode there will be a lot of disabled/missing WiFi spec features

Why You even consider to use this tiny card with low power transmitter? Just wait for wifi module like others. I’m sure it will be working nice for everyone.

Did you get the M.2 or MiniPCIe card?

They even sell a bundle currently for $80 with three antennas and pigtails. Though I’m not sure if this expense is worth it, when I want to buy the Wifi NIC anyway.