[BPI-R2] OpenWrt proposal

Banana Pi Router design
1

My proposal to all Opewrt developers:

can you together work on one OpenWrt build for BPI R2 which:

be available as image

allow to install opkg packages

allow to use all lan ports separately (different networks)

don’t care about built in wifi

don’t care about kernel version

surely this is my proposal (and needs) maybe you will tell what you think.

I can help testing

2

I think you should post it there https://forum.openwrt.org

3

OpenWrt is not officialy supported

But here there are some people who working on openwrt for R2 (and also R64)

4

Hi Maciek,

It don’t work this way for OpenWRT :slight_smile:

Regarding your proposal - you know, proposals are usually when people offer something to other interested parties on some terms. And other parties typically take a look at these terms and evaluate if they are interested or not.

As for R2 and OpenWRT - truth is that:

  1. Making it work with some minor caveats is not that hard for any experienced unix engineer with moderate knowledge of OpenWRT. It means that for people who are capable of working on getting BPiR2 support into upstream OpenWRT there’s no real need to work on it - it’s not a big deal to make it work for specific case to bother trying to overcome pressure and push it upstream.
  2. There are a lot of other linux distros for R2 that simply are more well-suited to be used with a pretty capable board equipped with a lot of storage space. OpenWRT is an excellent distro when you want to get more features from your generic router and have to squeeze software into hundreds megabytes of available flash storage (at best!). It is a totally different world picture when it is possible to easily have 1Tb RAID1 array in your disposal. Two R2 boards I currently have working in “pre-prod” environment both use CentOS AltArch as a base OS - it makes management more easy for me as all other server boxes I’ve got out there are running CentOS too. For fun-n-tests I’m okay with using Debian and Armbian. There’s no real need to drop back to OpenWRT with its specifics.

All in all it means that I don’t foresee that some collective effort will emerge to maintain an external OpenWRT fork to be used with BPi-R2 unless there would be some kind of motivating influence. Keep in mind that people who are capable of working on this are for the most part the well developed specialists earning a big wage and having really restricted amount of “free” time to spend on anything. It is okay to spend like a day or two on such a hobby project from time to time but a commitment to do a lasting maintenance of such a fork - it is a totally different deal. Best case scenario would be if some talented student would emerge with enough spare time and sufficient capabilities to work on this, then it might work for some time (probably till the moment of graduation).

5

OK. You’re right. Thanks for answer.

In meantime OpenMPTCProuter (extender openwrt) was available and seems to work OK.

6

It is already available in @cioby23 Thread. I have tested it and it works quite well but no wifi as you said you dont care about wifi so you can do with that.

It have the latest OpenWRT Interface, Adblocker using DNS and ability to install opkg.

Link to the forum Here

7

Thank you. I will take a look.

8

I think OpenWrt master should do what you want now. Snapshots available at https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mediatek/mt7623/

Just (gunzip and) write the bpi_bananapi-r2-squashfs-img.gz to an SD card and boot from that. As it boots, its U-Boot boot menu has an option for installing to the internal eMMC if you want to do that.

I’m working on instructions for installing it with the SP Flash tool, which is also fairly simple.

There is still work to be done on the wifi and HDMI support, but basic OpenWrt including preloader, U-Boot and sysupgrade is all working correctly. Mostly thanks to @LeXa2’s work, which I massaged a little and committed to OpenWrt upstream.

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