[fedora-arm] Banana Pi R1 on fedora 21

[Hans de Goede]

Hi,

On 01-01-15 11:47, Peter Robinson wrote:
>> I have bought a Banana Pi R1 board with a plan to use it as my gateway
>> server/router and to replace a full-size PC which was doing the job until
>> now . It has , beside the regular banana hardware , a SATA interface and
>> most importantly 5 Ethernet ports (1 wan connection and 4 LAN connections) .
>> My plan is to make it a router/firewall server as well as
>> ods-and-ends,print,http,file etc... machine . I was pleased to see that
>> Fedora 21 supports banana pi straight out of the box , so I rushed out and
>> installed the minimal version . All was good as far as getting the banana r1
>> booted and talking , however one crucial part does not work at the moment .
>> And that is wired networking , it seems that the drivers are not working or
>> are missing. I have been able to get it connected via an old USB-Ethernet
>> adapter which was recognised immediately. Can you please help in getting the
>> networking working , I can assist in providing prints , compiling software .
>> Any assistance is much appreciated .
>
> So the original Banana Pi also has a SATA port, the only real
> difference is the ethernet.
>
> The ethernet isn't really 5 ethernet ports at all. It's a single
> gigabit ethernet port on the ARM device attached to a 6 port ethernet
> switch which is then labelled as 4 LAN, 1 WAN with the 6th port being
> the port attached to the actual ARM SoC Gig ethernet port.

That is unfortunately not entirely accurate, what we've here is a MAC
which needs an external phy, connected directly to an ethernet switch
which takes a RGMII input as its upstream port. So we do not have ethernet
going over the PCB to the switch, but rather a protocol which is normally
spoken between a MAC and a phy, but now is used between a MAC and a
switch. In order for this to work we need a phy driver for the switch,
specifically this driver:

http://lwn.net/Articles/571390/

But that adds a new switch config API, which seems to have never gotten
anything, and the openwrt guys have "solved" this by just carrying this
driver with their non upstreamed API in their own kernels.

So you could try building your own kernel with this driver added,
or switch to one of the openwrt images for the board, short of that
there is no way to get this to work for now.

Regards,

Hans