[BPI-R4 Pro] and SFP

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4/BPI-R4 Pro(MT7988)
1

Hi guys,

I have a question regarding the SFP WAN port on your board.

According to the link modes reported by ethtool , the SFP WAN port supports the following modes (among others):

  • 1000BASE-KX/Full
  • 10000BASE-KR/Full

At the same time, there is no explicit support for 1000BASE-X/Full , which is the standard typically required by most 1G optical SFP modules .

It is important to note that in real ISP deployments, 1G and 2.5G optical SFP modules are most commonly used for customer connections, rather than 10G SFP+ modules(GPON ONU). These modules are widely used by providers for P2P fiber access and similar scenarios.

My question is: Will an optical SFP module that requires the 1000BASE-X/Full standard work on the SFP WAN port?

More specifically:

  • Can the SFP WAN port operate in 1000BASE-X (and/or 2.5G) mode for ISP-grade optical SFP modules?
  • Or is the port limited to KX/KR (backplane) modes , meaning that only 10G SFP+ modules are supported?

This information is critical to understand whether the SFP WAN port can be practically used with common ISP optical modules at 1G / 2.5G speeds, or if it is intended exclusively for 10G operation.

Thank you in advance for your clarification.

2

basicly also 1G/2.5G SFPs can be used (tested with my OEM 2.5G SFP) due to the pcs-change to lynxi driver. But some SFP do not work because they require power to set moddef0 and R4/R4Pro needs moddef0 set to low to power the SFP.

3

When you mention “the PCS change to the lynxi driver”, does this mean that the switch is already done at the firmware / kernel source level, or is this something that the user needs to configure or enable manually?

In other words, with current OpenWrt builds for R4 / R4 Pro, is the lynxi driver already in use by default?

4

Upstream Openwrt should do this for R4 already without user configuration. R4Pro is not yet supported by upstream openwrt.

5

Thanks, I’ll wait for the OpenWrt release — and hope that the GPON sticks 1G/2.5G will work.

6

GPON could be more tricky as most of them need specific quirks to work with linux due to bootup time and non standard handling of gpio signals. Afaik some have the moddef0-on-power problem

7

Do many GPON / SFP modules actually require moddef0 to be high or powered during boot?

A friend of mine has a GPON stick that works perfectly on the non-Pro version, so I assume the same stick should also work on the new Pro version, unless there are specific issues related to 1G / 2.5G modes or the moddef0 handling you mentioned.