[fedora-arm] Banana Pi R1 on fedora 21

Hans de Goede hdegoede at redhat.com
Thu Jan 1 19:54:53 UTC 2015


Hi,

On 01-01-15 14:50, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
>
> 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.

The problem is that getting this upstream requires getting a kernel API
into place for the switch config stuff (follow the link to the patch
I gave to get a link to all the discussion), although it seems that
most upstream developers think it should be possible to make things
work with existing interfaces. Basically this is something which will
take a large chunk of someone-s time, and I do not see myself working
on this soon.

Regards,

Hans


More information about the arm mailing list