Questions regarding BPI-R4

Banana Pi Router design BPI-R4(MT7988)
1

Hi,

This is my first post in the forum as I also get my first Banana Pi product today - BPI-R4, I do have some questions about it:

  1. Other than power LED, there are also a few LEDs, other than the SIM/SSD LED, there are also B/G LEDs which is not described anywhere (now I see B one has BLUE light which means booting?)

  2. I guess we can use 10G DAC cable on the SFP+ port without problem?

  3. I tried to download the OpenWrt SD card image to boot, 1GbE ports light up when connected to my client PC but client PC doesn’t get any IP, normal?

  4. Finally I saw some messages from console when booting from SD card like the following, so what’s that?

jffs2: jffs2_scan_eraseblock(): Magic bitmask 0x1985 not found at 0x3da40000: 0xff97 instead

2

  1. B=blue,G=green…these are leds for user specific usage. We use green as power-indicator,blur is not used yet.

  2. i have no dac cable so not tested yet,i guess it will work,but at least on mainline we have not yet 10g working (missing rss+lro software support),the max is currently at ~5Gbit/s

  3. you mean the bpi openwrt? Have not tried it as we are working on mainline support. It depends on setting on this image if there is a dhcp server running on these ports…try login via lucy or on serial console to check the settings

  4. no idea,but imho mainline openwrt will not use f2fs

1 Like
3

But now when I connect power, the RED is always ON, with something booting up the BLUE is also ON, when it’s rebooting it will go off.

So that means using SFP+ RJ45 copper max 5GbE rate?

I downloaded the image from the wiki page, now I need to at least find a way to boot into an OS to verify my board is working (I know the upstream to mainline is just started so I am now asking to see everything working), in case something is wrong I can still send it back to AliExpress.

I assume the wiki download image is kind of “proof of concept” image (it’s ok for not being in mainline kernel)

4

I talk about 10g (fibre) module (but copper should be same). downstream kernel should support rss/lro (at least sdk does).

Yes it dpends how leds are mapped in software…maybe bpi uses blue one for power indication. Red should be hard wired to power supply

5

Just received my BPI R4, and I ran into the same issue. In my case, it’s very serious. The error messages flood my serial console and renders it useless. After some digging I figured out the cause.

BPI’s Getting Started with BPI-R4 does have an extremely vague and ‘useless’ line that says:

Note: please low level format the SD and clear all data of SD. it’s very important.

In fact, that’s not a solution but does hint for some imagination. it’s not a solution because a binary image is bit-by-bit written to the SD card, whether you low format it or not doesn’t matter before writing with “bpi-copy” or BalenaEtcher.

The root cause should be the image itself generated by whatever procedures or tools used by MediaTek/BPI who prepared those official images.

Luckily, there is a quick way to fix it. Regardless you burn the image in Linux by using “bpi-copy” or in Windows/MacOS by BalenaEtcher, you will need to fix the SD partitions with “fdisk” in Linux after burning the image.

Simply ‘fdisk /dev/your sd card’ and press ‘w’ and then quit. This will fix it.

Hope this will help new R4 users out there.

6

If you have fixed it with fdisk, the problem would be the backup gpt at end of disk. You write the image (which is only some megabytes) to offset 0 of the disk. There is the main gpt which is different to the backup gpt at the end of disk.

Afair i had the errors only on first bootup and it looks like it fixes the issue on first run and after reboot there are not much errors.

7

I agree. The missing of backup GPT table should be the culprit. fdisk re-writes the backup table.

I cut short of my waiting because it seems taking forever.