Low Cost Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Router Board

https://www.cnx-software.com/2021/08/30/banana-pi-bpi-r2-pro-5-port-gigabit-ethernet-router-board-rockchip-rk3568/

by teleforce • 5 years ago

159 94 5 years ago

5x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports (1x WAN, 4x LAN) using Realtek RTL8367RB-VB-CG switch

So that should allow full speed switching (if not routing) without touching CPU, right? That'd be a welcome touch in a network box

oarsinsync• 5 years ago

Isn’t that already true of various MikroTik 5 port boards, as well as the Ubiquiti EdgerouterX?

Both of which are a similar price point, and include a case by default.

walterbell• 5 years ago

Can they run generic Debian or OpenBSD? Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite supports OpenBSD, but has been unavailable for months.

teleforce• 5 years ago

Both specs for MicroTik and Ubiquiti EdgerouterX are much inferior to BPI-R2 Pro, for example EdgerouterX (currently out of stock) only supports 256MB RAM while the latter can support up to 4GB RAM.

Another is that I believe RPI-R2 can support the mainline Linux kernel with normal distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), do MikroTik and EdgerouterX support that as well in addition to OpenWRT?

sam_lowry_• 5 years ago

I am running Mikrotik hAP AC aka MikroTik RouterBOARD RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT using OpenWRT on the home network with 700..900Mbps speeds already. Mikrotik has hardware switching and OpenWRT can use it.

the_biot2• 5 years ago

That's right, the Realtek RTL8367RB-VB-CG is an ethernet switch chip, and so it certainly will allow for full speed switching, entirely internally.

It's not nearly as rare as all that, your basic OpenWRT-running 5-port router has the same setup. But those cheap SOHO routers aren't going to do really fast routing, because they typically come with very slow CPUs.

This board's Rockchip RK3568 looks pretty capable though.

bayindirh• 5 years ago

It's not nearly as rare as all that, your basic OpenWRT-running 5-port router has the same setup.

IME, this kind of divided switching/routing setup became ubiquitous after gigabit became widely available. I remember that while buying my previous router (Cisco Linksys E4200), this architecture was advertised explicitly, and it was exclusive to E4200 in that generation of Cisco/Linksys routers.

The main firmware of E4200 was prone to crashing under some circumstances, so having a good network sans DNS was a good trade-off back then.

Hikikomori3• 5 years ago

Something available in pretty much all consumer/smb routers?

globular-toast3• 5 years ago

What's the advantage of this over a separate switch? I just want two (or more) network interfaces in a router.

BenjiWiebe• 5 years ago

If you have a managed switch, you can use VLANs and get by with a single network port on your router.

gigel82• 5 years ago

Does that imply you cannot use this for a firewall solution? If it's a totally separate switch, wouldn't you be better off with a RPi and a cheap switch?

namero999• 5 years ago

So far my experience with Banana Pi products has been of great hardware, at great price point, but miserable software to the point of frustration. The best help always comes from good samaritans on GH releasing experimental builds that somehow work, but you have to actively look for them. Anyone with better luck than me has pointers to solid B-PI resources?

RL_Quine• 5 years ago

This has been the same story with all ARM boards for at least a decade. They have promising specs, atrocious linux support, and it never improves no matter what. Get a x86 APU2 and just run mainline linux on it, they're the same price as the ARM board but have perfect compatibility with everything.

https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

the_biot2• 5 years ago

To be fair it mostly looks that way because ARM has ruled the market for at least a decade, and there's just so many of them. But yes, many vendors make no effort to mainline their code.

But some do, or pay those samaritans to, and as a result you can definitely get boards (including this kind of 5-port switches) that run completely supported on a mainline kernel.

My home gateway is a Turris Omnia, supported in mainline for years. I run a plain Debian on it, works great.

tecleandor• 5 years ago

The sad part is APU boards seem to be backordered until next year :(

https://www.pcengines.ch/newshop.php?c=4

holri2• 5 years ago

I have 3 Olimexino A20 Boards running on Debian stable without any external repos/software. All hardware for an audio/web/django/email/xmpp/backup server is running fine for years.

ziml77• 5 years ago

I've been using one of these to run pfSense (and recently OPNSense) for years now. Has given me zero issues. Also easily handles acting as a VPN server. Less powerful devices tend to be bottlenecked on how fast the VPN connection is by the speed of the processor (I think AES-NI is helping a lot here).

LargoLasskhyfv4• 5 years ago

In my experience this started with the BPI-R1. They should refund all buyers, and give an excuse and explanation in public how this mess came to be.

Higly unlikely, though.

Until then: AVOID!

pahae2• 5 years ago

What are you referring to exactly? I do remember having trouble with their official OS until I switched to Armbian on my aged BPI-M1+

ericyan3• 5 years ago

Frank W is the man. He did a much better job than SinoVOIP staff would.

Wiki: https://www.fw-web.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:bpi-r2:start

Kernel: https://github.com/frank-w/BPI-R2-4.14

top_sigrid• 5 years ago

I am really looking forward to the day, when opnsense/pfsense runs on ARM hardware. Would open it to the world of all these great ARM boards.

globular-toast3• 5 years ago

I'm all for having more choice, but you can get complete Intel Atom systems with Intel NICs, case, power supply, passive cooling etc. for not much more than this board.

vladvasiliu3• 5 years ago

With multiple NICs? Do you have a link? I've been looking around for such a thing for a while now, but the ones I see tend to be quite expensive (~500 €), and it's not always clear they have Intel NICs).

In my case, the best compromise I've found, is to accept having a bigger a computer and recycle some older EliteDesk / OptiPlex or similar, which usually are very quiet and can take PCIe network cards. The thinner ones use low-profile cards, which can accommodate 4 ports.

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

For anyone interested in this kind of thing, I am designing a board to hold two Raspberry Pi CM4 modules connected to a gigabit switch with 3 extra RJ45 jacks.

My hope is to make a somewhat minimal board for CM4 clustering. Eventually I will make a version with 4 CM4s and a single RJ45 jack, but I started with two CM4s and three jacks so I could test the ethernet switch independently of a CM4. And it turns out this board has some interesting uses too. I will break out both PCIe ports for the CM4s, so this board could have two intel wifi adapters plus three ethernet ports. It seems like that would make it a useful general purpose network thing. For example you could put a long range parabolic antenna on one wifi adapter and an omni antenna on the other and make it into a remote network access point (like a Ubiquiti Nanobeam connected to an AP). It should support VLANs etc as I will connect to the management interface on the switch via SPI or I2C.

However it is one of many projects I am working on, so I can't give a firm completion date. Microchip tells me they will ship me the ICs I need in a month, so it would be nice to have layout done by then. But we'll see.

Fork or star it on github to follow along. https://github.com/tlalexander/rpi-cm4-switch-board

Also if you have other thoughts about the design please share!

cpach• 5 years ago

I’m not currently in the market for this but I must say: Very cool project. Godspeed!

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

foxfluff• 5 years ago

Don't forget to check the errata for that switch and apply the recommended workarounds. That fixed some link stability issues I witnessed on boards with KSZ9567.

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

Ah great tip thank you!

fsagx• 5 years ago

The CM3s and CM4s are so hard to find. The regular pis are still available, albeit at a higher price. Given that the CMs were intended for industrial/commercial integration, it seems like they would have a priority. They are mostly the same components.

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

Well the big issue with the CM4 is that there are 32 possible variants. As far as I can tell, a couple CM4 variants tend to be in stock at least in the USA last I checked. Only seeing one variant in stock right now at PiShop but it's there:

https://www.pishop.us/product/raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-...

The thing about industrial customers is that they are willing to buy whatever variant is available now for testing, spend a year doing design and integration, and then switch to the correct module for final system tests. I'm doing this with a project at work right now.

I could speculate that some hobbyist customers who might buy a raspberry pi would just as soon buy something else if they're just trying to learn electronics. So I would think commercial customers would be more resilient to delays than the hobby customers (as long as one or two variants are in stock to test).

And releasing 32 different variants of a new design during a global chip shortage seems reason enough for delays.

Frustrating though!

Abishek_Muthian3• 5 years ago

All the best!

The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.

That seems like a reasonable criticism and if so it could apply to RPi CM4 as well, AFAIK they don't have network specific accelerators. Are you planning to address this with some additional co-processors?

If you end-up adding network specific accelerators, Please do work with OpenWrt team as lack of HW accelerator support (WiFi offloading) unlike proprietary firmware is a major pain point.

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

Ah interesting. I don't see mention of NAT or address translation at all in the datasheet for the switch I am using. Since the original plan was just to mate CM4s with a switch I hadn't considered any additional network hardware.

This seems like a Rev2 thing. I could get the basic system up and running without additional complexity. But I really like the idea of forks of my work so once I've proven the basic layout I'd be happy to collaborate with the community on improvements.

Do you have any more information on that type of hardware or suggestions on how to learn more? Maybe I should get on the OpenWRT mailing list and introduce myself.

ac29• 5 years ago

The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.

Does this really matter? It only has 1Gbps Ethernet, so shouldnt software NAT be fine? I have a significantly less powerful router with no hardware acceleration, and its never been an issue to get maximum speed, though my connection is only 100Mbit (over-provisioned to be about 20% faster).

newman3142• 5 years ago

The CM4 network chip has hardware timestamp support, it'd be great if you could ensure that this is available through the interface.

I'm actively looking for a CM4 board that will support hardware timestamp so that I can use a CM4 to build a NTP + PTP master.

TaylorAlexander8• 5 years ago

Interesting. You mean support the use of the SYNC_IN and SYNC_OUT pins? I could break those out. Looks like they are still working on support, but I could break out the pins. https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/4151

jstsch• 5 years ago

Would this board be capable of switching AVB (IEEE 1722.1 specifically)? Existing switches are ridiculously priced, and this might be a great solution paired with some open source code for (home) music studios.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging

zamadatix• 5 years ago

The particular switch chip used here (the RTL8367RB-VB-CG) is older than IEEE 1722.1. And even if it did support AVB/TSN it'd still be cheaper to get said hardware switch without attached SBC.

Remember for true AVB you're asking for network wide sync to the nanosecond with stream based traffic shaping and bandwidth reservations done in hardware accurate to those timings. It's all a real PITA to implement hence the price. That being said you can get a semi-reasonably priced switch like the MOTU AVB for <$500. If you need tons of ports the best way is going to be an older enterprise switch that supports AVB up for resale but beware you'll likely need the AVB license along with the hardware and it's an uncommon license.

numpad0• 5 years ago

Feature set and overall shape resembles a surveillance camera recorder with WWAN and NVMe SSD support. Could it be based off such product?

mugsie• 5 years ago

this is a bit more, but if people are looking for a more capable (e.g. 10Gig, more ports, and more CPU) I really like the ten64 I got. https://www.crowdsupply.com/traverse-technologies/ten64

I am currently getting Vyos to run on it (I have nearly everything working, apart from the 5G module I have on the board).

That said, I think Vyos is in a state to support being run on this board as well, which would be cool.

newman3142• 5 years ago

This looks interesting. Do you have a GitHub repo tracking your config?

Vyos looks interesting and might be my next setup when my ER4 runs out of oomph.

gigatexal• 5 years ago

Non Intel nics are a dealbreaker since my use case would be a pfsense box

Cyder• 5 years ago

I own 2 of the original version of this board. Banana pi has a small community and little support. I was suckered in by the good specs but it's a serious hassle to even boot and documentation is just plain bad. Banana pi boards are for the very experienced soc developer. Limited OS, limited documentation, limited support. Limited success.

noasaservice• 5 years ago

Same here. Except I'd also like to add in the extra problem of "stability" - or lack thereof.

I had them on ethernet. Disabled wifi, verified they're getting enough power. And between 18-30 hours of operation, all the nodes will go unresponsive. A serial cable shows the machines up, but they lose all network connectivity.

There's nothing in dmesg. The networks are just dead.

It's not worth enough for me to troubleshoot them. They're terrible hardware platforms, badly supported, and garbage to use.

ericyan3• 5 years ago

I also own the original R2 board and the best doc I have found so far is actually not the official wiki, but the one created by Frank W: https://www.fw-web.de/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:bpi-r2:start

I was hoping that I can built my own router with it, but so far it is still a learning process. Although, it is still fun.

walrus01• 5 years ago

the major problem with most of these devices is lack of operating system support.

at least raspbian is very close to stock debian.

if trying to DIY your own router and you are willing to spend just a little bit more money, you can save a great deal of hassle with non-standard weird SOC-vendor-specific linux problems...

use an ordinary small x86-64 motherboard, put a 4-port intel 1000BaseT card in it, and run regular debian, or pfsense, or openbsd or something.

CameronNemo3• 5 years ago

The rk3568 already has better support for mainline Linux than the raspberry pi, despite only being few months old.

e2le• 5 years ago

at least raspbian is very close to stock debian.

Debian supports the Raspberry Pi, best to avoid Raspbian.

https://raspi.debian.net/

0kto• 5 years ago

After several tries, I just gave mine away, for the same reasons. There are so many boards that are a pleasure to work with, but this one was not worth the hassle.

I can recommend the replacement, a PC engines board with four Gigabit Lan ports running OpenWRT.

_jsnk• 5 years ago

I've been running OpenWrt on my original r2 as my primary router and it has been rock solid. (both snapshot builds and now builds from the 21.02 branch). The default builds for the r2 available for download from OpenWrt are very bare bones so I don't recommend that route.

The onboard mediatek wifi isn't usable but using a mini pcie ath10k supported wifi module has worked great.

It definitely wasn't easy initially tracking down info for getting things working. No argument there.

I'd be happy to share my OpenWrt build config for the r2 for anyone interested.

loxias• 5 years ago

Nice writeup! I've been meaning to replace my router with something more... controllable ever since I moved. Using a GigE USB feels messy, handling all those URBs I figure will tax the CPU more than I want.

Heaven would be any board that can run Debian and has 2 GigE NICs, and for psychological reasons $100 feels like a hard limit. Annoyingly hard niche to fill!

xattt• 5 years ago

Add capability for gigabit QoS traffic shaping too for an even harder niche to fill!

sliken• 5 years ago

Similar solution, odroid HC2 (with 2x2.5gbe) and the $47 board to add 4 more ports of 2.5gbe.

api• 5 years ago

Does it have AES support in the CPU? The Pi 4 doesn't, which is weird... only ARM64 I've ever seen that lacks crypto extensions.

CameronNemo3• 5 years ago

The rk3568 does license the crypto extensions.

It is a really good board hardware wise. And mainline Linux support is coming along pretty quickly.

You can check the Quartz64 development wiki for updates for that board, which should carry over to other rk3566/rk3568 boards too. Right now the major drivers that have not been ported are the hdmi output and sink output driver.

The blocker for me buying one of these boards is that firmware sources have not been published, so devs are still using u-boot from the soc vendor (rockchip). It isn't terrible, but I have high standards now that my rk3328 and rk3399 devices run mainline u-boot with open source boot firmware.

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

I am genuinely curious besides NAS what do people use gigabit ethernet for?

Most people's WAN uplink is in the single or maybe double digit megabit range.

InvaderFizz• 5 years ago

Considering that Ethernet connections are synchronous up/down, I'm not sure what slow uplink has to do with anything.

martin8412• 5 years ago

No it's not. 80%+ of the country where I live have access to symmetric gigabit fiber.

morpheos1372• 5 years ago

Most people world wide do not have gigabit internet. The fact that you live some place that does does not invalidate this point. Furthermore most people can do almost everything they need with several mbps.

bserge• 5 years ago

Wow, this actually looks great for a custom router - I assume I can use a miniPCIe wifi card to get AP functionality? That would make it perfect.

Not what I'd call affordable at $90 but the hardware and software abilities look promising.

ryandrake• 5 years ago

I like this idea of Other Fruit Pi boards designed for special, non-general computing applications like routers. Is the stock pi design "open" enough that skilled board designers can just plug-and-play and manufacture these kinds of custom boards, or does it take SeriousBusiness™ resources to do these things?

I'd be super interested in a Pi with a few SDRs built in. Currently I currently play with a Pi with a bunch of USB SDR dongles jammed into it but wouldn't it be nice to have all the RF hardware and connectors built into the main board?

dnautics4• 5 years ago

Is this board intended to route packets using the CPU/Linux kernel or does the CPU act on a control plane on top of the two Ethernet controllers which talk to each other directly? Recently I set up a relatively powerful AMD "nuc" as a wifi AP and found my speed to be a dismal 7Mbps - enough for my office needs but I wonder if the cpu is liable to be a bottleneck (it's also possible I set something up very wrong)

CameronNemo3• 5 years ago

The first one. Although I'm surprised throughput was so low with the setup you describe.

dnautics4• 5 years ago

Haha yeah I probably messed something up. I should also check for dropped packets but my wifi-fu is not that good

jake_morrison• 5 years ago

I was attracted by the specs of the previous version of this board, but the software side was a real mess. I screwed around with it quite a bit, but ended up giving up on them.

The company didn't have a reasonable, up to date kernel. Everything was out of date, and they were seemingly incapable of doing it. MediaTek people stepped in, because the board was getting press as a reference for how people could use their SOC. It was still not usable as a router. For example, while there is WiFi on the board, there is no Linux WiFi driver, only an Android driver. And other weird things that I forget right now.

Maybe things have improved, but definitely take care on this.

Low Cost Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Router Board

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