OpenWrt 25.12.5 Build Guide for Banana Pi BPI-R4-8P

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4/BPI-R4 Pro(MT7988)
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Hello everyone,

While setting up OpenWrt 25.12.5 on my Banana Pi BPI-R4-8P (8 GB RAM + PoE) with the BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 (MediaTek MT7996) Wi-Fi module, I found that much of the required information was scattered across different forum posts, GitHub repositories, and documentation.

After successfully building and validating the firmware on real hardware, I decided to consolidate the entire process into a single guide and publish it on GitHub.

The guide includes:

  • Preparing the build environment
  • Building OpenWrt 25.12.5 from source
  • Applying the MT7996 transmit power patch
  • Installing the appropriate BL2 bootloader for 8 GB RAM support
  • Expanding the eMMC partition
  • Firmware verification
  • Troubleshooting and additional notes

The repository contains both English and Russian editions of the guide.

GitHub repository:

I hope this guide will help other BPI-R4-8P users save time and avoid some of the trial and error I went through during the build process.

Feedback, suggestions, and corrections are always welcome.

Many thanks to the Banana Pi team for developing the BPI-R4 platform, and to the OpenWrt community for making projects like this possible.

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Nice!

I’ll take a more in-depth look at this shortly but having just glanced at it, I would say a Dockerfile or anything that allows one to make a reproducible build would be very useful. If you can’t make a Dockerfile an VM image would be okay, I guess.

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Thank you for the suggestion! I completely agree that a reproducible build environment would be a valuable addition.

My main goal for the first release was to document the complete build process as clearly as possible. I’m already thinking about Release 1.2, which I plan to prepare after the next OpenWrt release.

Besides updating the guide to the new OpenWrt version, I’d like to explore a couple of improvements. One is testing whether it’s possible to build a fully functional 8 GB BL2 directly from the OpenWrt sources, eliminating the need for a separate prebuilt BL2. Another is documenting a reliable firmware upgrade path instead of focusing only on clean installations.

A Docker-based build environment is also definitely something I’d like to explore as part of that work.

Thank you for the great idea!

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