I recently bought a R4Pro and decided to spend the last few weeks to make it into a perfect main router device. I am happy to report that I now have a fully functional and error free R4Pro 8x (as far as I can tell) running ArchLinux and @frank-w kernel. I’ve submitted my PR against frank’s 7.1-main so feel free to fetch them from there if you have issues. What works and have seen people complain about here:
- the MxL86252C switch with 1.0.70 firmware.
- BE14 and other pcie related crashes.
- Speed up boot AS21011 WAN link
- Various memory and cast related bugs addressed as stumbled upon by Claude
One other major thing to highlight is that I finally managed to trace and fix an error for a packet corrupting bug that as far as I could tell affects both BPI-R3 and BPI-R4: Fix a use-after-free in the QDMA TX path that silently corrupts forwarded traffic by meehien · Pull Request #197 · frank-w/BPI-Router-Linux · GitHub. I observed this first back in 2024 (@[BPI-R3] weird networking issue (and weirder "solution") - #42 by sparkie) when I proposed a fix with:
ethtool -K eth0 tx
I am happy to say that with this patch applied tx off is no longer required and my network is 20% faster. Kudos to Claude for the debugging help.