[fedora-arm] Banana Pi R1 on fedora 21

[Robert Moskowitz]

On 01/01/2015 07:30 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
> 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.

The operative words here is 'for now'.  Hans, I know you are chipping 
away at all of the features, adding them one by one.  This is something 
I have wanted for over a year; is there any idea on this support?  F22? 
  F23?

Tommorrow is my last day with my day job, as my employer has eliminated 
my group and a move to another group really meant a move which I won't 
do.  So Monday I start doing consulting work and see if there are any 
fulltime jobs that match my interests.  A good severance package gives 
me time.  But the reason I mention this, is one of my potential business 
plans includes a highly capable, low power/size CPE device.  Multiple 
LAN ports with Fedora today, Centos tomorrow is on my list.