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Comment by Cyder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> at least raspbian is very close to stock debian.

Debian supports the Raspberry Pi, best to avoid Raspbian.

https://raspi.debian.net/

I'm curious, why use an unofficial Debian build maintained by one developer[1] rather than Raspian?

Not knocking the Debian build, just wondering.

[1]: "This site is not an official Debian project. While the maintainer (Gunnar Wolf) is a Debian Developer, content herein provided should be considered unofficial. "

Raspian originally was a custom build of Debian to target the unusual hardware support of the 1st gen Pi (it had hardware float but not other bits needed for the armhf architecture, e.g. like having SSE but no PAE on x86, I can't remember the details though). Newer Pis are more standard (see "Are the images 32 or 64 bits?" at https://raspi.debian.net/faq/), and so Raspian isn't needed for them. So that's the difference between Debian and Raspian (there's likely other differences with extra things the RPi foundation has added, but YMMV if you find them useful or not).

For SoCs, you can either do the installation on the device (which can be painful), or build a chroot with the needed features and flash it to hardware (e.g. sdcard or some board storage), https://raspi.debian.net/ is providing pre-built chroots for you to flash (but if you wanted, you could use https://salsa.debian.org/raspi-team/image-specs to build/customise your own). There's lots of similar projects which build a Debian chroot for a specific SoC, either with custom kernels or with a specific feature-set (e.g. freedombox: https://www.freedomboxfoundation.org/). None of these are "official" Debian projects (I think debian installer a.k.a. d-i is the only official/supported way of doing a install), but many are run by Debian Developers scratching a specific itch.

FYI, if you look at https://salsa.debian.org/raspi-team/image-specs/-/commits/ma..., there appears to be a fair few people who've made changes, and a least a few of them I recognise as being DDs, so it's not just one person (Gunnar Wolf is probably the person the name's been allocated to, and he probably wrote the docs). If it's security support you're thinking about, I'd put those images as more likely to have a fix early than Raspian (as those images are stock Debian, not rebuilds).

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.

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