BPI-R4 Pro First-time Setup: eMMC Installation Workflow & Docker/RAID Feasibility

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

Hi everyone,

I just purchased a Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro. This is my first time using a dedicated router board (coming from standard ISP hardware) and my first experience with OpenWrt, so I want to make sure I understand the setup process correctly.

1. Installation to eMMC Based on the documentation, I understand that the SD card and eMMC share the same controller, meaning they cannot be active at the same time. Since we cannot boot directly from USB, I am unsure about the correct path to install the OS to eMMC.

Is the following workflow correct?

  1. Boot from SD Card.
  2. Mount a USB drive containing the images and flash the NAND image.
  3. Power off and change boot switches to NAND Boot.
  4. Boot from NAND (so eMMC becomes visible).
  5. Mount the USB drive again and flash the system image to eMMC using dd.
  6. Switch to eMMC Boot for the final setup.

Is that true?

2. Home Server Plans I plan to install 2x 4TB NVMe SSDs and configure them in RAID. My goal is to run Docker containers for Nextcloud, Jellyfin, and Home Assistant. Since I am not very proficient with the terminal, I plan to manage these containers using Portainer.

Is there any technical blocker for this specific setup on OpenWrt with the R4 Pro?

Thanks in advance for your guidance!

2

Hello @furkan , I am using debian on emmc instead of openwrt as sfp nas + iscsi server, therefore I do not know nothing about the running docker containers in openwrt, but it looks good from my point of view. At least the 1) installation to emmc.

Please notice that there are more skilled engineers / users than me :slight_smile: GLHF

3

You could install your Linux OS directly on nvme, when you have U-Boot on nand.

Keep in mind that m.2 m is PCIe3.0 1lane only.

4

About your second point and moving docker to another mount point on OpenWrt.

docker
docker1080×1224 89.5 KB

I recommend you familiarize yourself with docker compose instead of Portainer. It’s easy to use and saves system resources.