Banana Pi R2

[chwe]

 

18 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

as long as it is not banana Aldi beer.

Maybe I bring you a beer from austria. There's one called 'Mohrenbräu', nothing against austria, but @eternalWalker your beer is disgusting.  Maybe on the same level than a glass water from Flint Michigan... (there might be a bit sarcasm in this answer)

(from: http://www.bierbasis.de/newsImg/62f5c6dbc3607c0acacfd715b26497c5/mohren2.jpg)

Obviously, it might be a bad idea showing up with such a beer these days in the US.  

 

So, enough off topic bullshiting, I like that an experienced user/developer like @JohnnyWednesday found our forum, and I'm glad to see if he can share some valid data about the performance/stability of the R2 soon. 

 

[Igor]

7 hours ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

A feat any ARM board with mPCIe/PCIe

The only (almost) quirk free mPCI implementation on board that we support is Clearfog. Others have various issues in PCI stack. Having quirk free mPCI experience within MediaTek / Sinovoip is, of course, possible but it is very unlikely.

[tkaiser]

10 hours ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

They're development boards - we're developers - we don't need our hands held - so why complain that nobody is holding them?

 

13 hours ago, eternalWalker said:

Can it be that you are really allergic to bananas?

 

Folks, be assured that I won't monitor this thread any more. Keep on babbling and ignore which fights have been fought to get any REAL information from the worst SBC vendor at least I know.

[JohnnyWednesday]

As you wish but you're kinda proving my point by doing so. You're biased for whatever reason - after reading a year of hostility from you I even wondered if you were being paid by a competitor - probably not but for somebody that has dismissed BPi? you sure spend an awful lot of time going out of your way to drag them through the mud.

I don't believe any of the points you've raised can be seen as a logical reflection on new designs and developments - you've not had any experience with the Mediatek SoC in question - you don't own an R2 - it's impossible for you to dismiss this board on technical grounds at this stage - there's not a criticism I've ever seen you raise that couldn't be applied to companies, SoCs and boards you happily advocate.

If you don't like them and don't wish to support them? that's your prerogative but your continued attack in light of your professed leanings comes across as petty.

Did a Banana Pi steal your girlfriend?  

When things are sufficiently developed and performance of the drivers is up to a production standard  - I hope that you and the team will consider reassessing at least the R2 - I'm perfectly happy to actually do the work if you don't want to touch it.

But regardless of the respect I have for you and how much I like Armbian - if personal bias gets in the way of technical progress? then expect to be forked - it's the natural order of things.

Take care

[zador.blood.stained]

I can agree with one thing - IMO it's better to ignore the hardware ot its vendor instead of constantly throwing dirt at them hoping that things will change. Instead of actively trying to improve them (which doesn't work as can be seen) let them improve themselves if they want the attention and possible software support.

 

14 minutes ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

When things are sufficiently developed and performance of the drivers is up to a production standard  - I hope that you and the team will consider reassessing at least the R2 - I'm perfectly happy to actually do the work if you don't want to touch it.

While @tkaiser IMO spends too much time being negative about the vendor and/or hardware, he raises at least 3 valid points that apply to this vendor in general:

• Wrong or incomplete technical specifications and documentation
• False advertising
• Hardware design issues

While I didn't pay too much attention to the BPi R2 board, with other boards those points would cause some problems: people that buy hardware by public information and specifications won't be able to use some of the claimed features, and hardware design issues may result in either stability issues or inability to use some of the features without hardware mods (or both).

So R2 should be poked with a long stick first (to check if any of those points apply to this board), then somebody (not the vendor!) has to do stability tests and check if primary hardware features (LAN, SATA, mPCIe, wireless) are working as expected, and after that it's OK to start work on mainline based configuration.

[Lion Wang]

1. I respect all the work done by armbian, and they do a lot of work, especially igor. I respect anyone who does anything for the open source community, and all work should be respected.I also want to work closely with armbian at Open source development, but the way must be correct.

2. All of TK's comments, I don't know where I have offended him, and you can see that his comments are full of malice and disgust, so most of them, I can only choose to ignore them.A product, especially an open source product, can't be perfected all at once, and if you try to find a reason to attack, there will be countless ways to attack, but it won't improve anything.We need all of us to do what we can to support ourselves, even if it's a little bit of a word of affirmation.Sometimes, standing and watching, not talking, is also a support.

3. I have been working on LINUX product software and hardware development for 17 years and have learned how to cooperate with the chip original factory.What I do now is try to make the chip plant open source a bit, provide as much information and technology as possible, and slowly promote the development of open source.

4. Regarding R2, I want to really understand the hardware people, understand how much work we have done, and how much effort MTK has made to support this project.That's what's going on.TK can't easily veto everything just because of the subjective judgment of his own knowledge. It's unfair.

5, we must have done many things wrong, which is a process of learning.If this process makes some people uncomfortable, I'm here to say I'm sorry.

6. For TK, he even attacks my English very bad, YES, maybe we can communicate in Chinese, rest assured, here I will not make fun of your poor Chinese.

[zador.blood.stained]

On 15.08.2017 at 10:47 AM, tkaiser said:

Folks, be assured that I won't monitor this thread any more.

I'm sorry, but why starting it in the first place? For the sole purpose of humiliating the vendor?

As I said previously, I'm against creating a "board bring up" threads without an actual intent to add support for the hardware in the nearest future. And while the M2 berry thread can be called a "quick review" because it is based on evaluating an actual hardware sample, this thread is based mostly on speculations and it contains more than 3 pages of anything but a board bring up related discussion.

The worst part of it is that a personal opinion (that at first glance can only be described as "toxicity towards a specific vendor") can be associated with the Armbian project and community as a whole, and I wouldn't be surprised if some other vendors that wanted to establish contact with us decided to not do it because they don't need a shitstorm in their direction for a couple of bad decisions made in the past.

IMO this thread belongs in the "General chit chat" section if not in the recycle bin.

[tkaiser]

13 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said:

recycle bin

 

Do what you want.

 

13 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said:

why starting it in the first place?

 

Care to remember when I started this thread here? On June 23th. Back at that time there existed ZERO publicly available INFORMATION wrt Banana Pi R2. I wasted my time to poke the vendor over and over again to provide information, to release schematics (which they didn't since they don't understand why it's important to provide schematics if you're not able to provide technical documentation or any correct information) and to release sources. Care to remember for what this vendor is famous and why this was important?

 

I was interested in this MT7623 device from the very beginning at the moment I realized Mediatek started to open themselves (that's the reason I asked maybe 30 times over in the Banana forum to show us the existence of sources since MTK was known to only provide sources for insane amounts of money JUST UNTIL RECENTLY. Of course everybody has forgotten this now). Care to remember that everything that was available 7 weeks ago was 'wait and see', 'we finish all driver now and github then', 'why you so crazy, give us time'.

 

7 weeks ago I got the guy responsible for the mess in Banana forum posting as 'bpi sinovoip team' to provide a boot log, started to analyze the information therein which led to my account over there being banned and many of my posts including this analysis deleted, and decided to provide the information gathered here since SinoVoip is obviously still not able to provide technical documentation worth the name or any real information at all (since you never know if it's just copy&paste gone wrong or something real).

 

Well, today we know that MTK is providing a BSP without the need to sign an NDA or having to pay for sources, today we know they're actively upstreaming patches to get this SoC and board supported by mainline Linux, today we know that their coders/engineers try to fill SinoVoip's gap over at their forum answering technical questions. Care to remember how the situation looked like 7 weeks ago?

 

Do what you want! I really don't want to waste any more time with this Banana mess (since I wasted already so much time trying to support them and their hardware even if they send out broken dev samples, install a Dunning-Kruger guy between them and the outside, don't inform us about important changes and so on). And you're absolutely right: they prove that they're not able to improve in any important area. They simply don't get the idea why false advertising is wrong, why providing false information is wrong, why babbling about open source is wrong when you're keeping everything closed at the same time, why it's wrong to be disrespectful to open source community (care to remember how they deal with this pull request and so many others?) and so on.

[JohnnyWednesday]

"Folks, be assured that I won't monitor this thread any more."

Sounds like you're the one full of s**t to me

[zador.blood.stained]

48 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

I really don't want to waste any more time with this Banana mess

Unfortunately this is not the first time I hear this, but you still wasted your time in this thread, BPi M2 berry thread or almost every recent article on the cnx-software related to hardware made by Sinovoip.

 

Again, my point is that a "board bring up" thread should be started with the intention of adding support for the device, and it should consist mostly of the discussions related to the hardware, and software and documentation for this specific device.

 

Until the board in question meets the basic requirements already (somebody has a sample, all necessary documentation and sources were already released) let's keep these threads in a different format - review, discussion, speculation based on the public information, but not a "board bring up".

 

The first and third posts in this thread already have a drama regarding deleting forum posts, questioning the vendors reputation, comparison to other unrelated devices, a history lesson regarding different efforts to improve the vendor or even helping them, and the 4th post focuses on a different (completely unrelated) device, and I don't see how this can help us with bringing this device to our build system.

 

48 minutes ago, tkaiser said:

Do what you want!

I intend to move it to the "General chit chat" section and remove the [Board Bring Up] prefix in the title.

Also BPi M2 Berry thread can be moved to the reviews subforum since you tested an actual hardware sample.

 

If/when vendor releases updated/corrected specifications it would be easy to copy-paste them into a newly created board bring up thread, but I don't have to tell you what are the chances of this happening.

[JohnnyWednesday]

OK let's be clear - board schematics are released (we don't need them to develop software - please explain why you need them and please link us to all the posts you've made about other vendors not releasing schematics) the data sheet for the SoC is released (not enough for you? I thought you knew what you were doing)

Today this - today that - Mediatek have been contributing updates/patches for nearly a year - or are you unable to use google?

You know what? don't waste your time - I'll do the work - you go throw your toys out of the pram while the professionals get on with the job.

I don't want to work with somebody with such petty and atrocious attitudes as yours. You're an embarrassment to this project - you're single handily saying to all vendors out there "Hey we're Armbian, we'll treat you like s**t unless you bow down to tkaiser's every little whim"

There's kernel sources, uboot sources, datasheet, board schematics - tkaiser - you're so full of crap I'm surprised it's not leaking out of your ears.

[zador.blood.stained]

@JohnnyWednesday

Please avoid making personal insults.

[TonyMac32]

In the case of specific hardware with partial or incorrect device trees, etc, the schematics are quite useful for pin numbers etc.  There are always examples of features not fully implemented, even when advertised. 

 

As an Electrical Engineer, I would politely remind you that code does not execute in a magical place where no physics exist.  Things like "can this board be powered via GPIO?"  "What is the maximum current available via USB?".  "Is the SD regulator capable of switching to 1.8V for high speed?" "How are the processor opp voltages derived?". All require schematics to verify, especially when the company spends all their time on new boards and almost none on support.

[JohnnyWednesday]

2 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

@JohnnyWednesday

Please avoid making personal insults.

I have no desire to - the idea is to reflect tkaiser's attitude - he's done nothing but insult the vendor for months, even going as far as to criticising their grasp of English - that's not just insulting - it's borderline racist.

[JohnnyWednesday]

2 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

In the case of specific hardware with partial or incorrect device trees, etc, the schematics are quite useful for pin numbers etc.  There are always examples of features not fully implemented, even when advertised. 

 

As an Electrical Engineer, I would politely remind you that code does not execute in a magical place where no physics exist.  Things like "can this board be powered via GPIO?"  "What is the maximum current available via USB?".  "Is the SD regulator capable of switching to 1.8V for high speed?" "How are the processor opp voltages derived?". All require schematics to verify, especially when the company spends all their time on new boards and almost none on support.

Very fair points! well we have the schematics so there's no problem then, is there?

[TonyMac32]

1 minute ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

Very fair points! well we have the schematics so there's no problem then, is there?

 

I did not say there was, I was addressing your assertions that they were useless to software developers, in case anyone had a similar opinion or hadn't considered it before.  Now, let's all bring the combative nonsense and slander down a notch, shall we?  

 

   

[tkaiser]

18 hours ago, Lion Wang said:

For TK, he even attacks my English very bad, YES, maybe we can communicate in Chinese, rest assured, here I will not make fun of your poor Chinese

 

Congratulations, @Nora Lee. Your strategy works pretty well. I'm sorry that I cited @Lion Wang directly several times instead of trying to interpret his sentences. But I'm not a native english speaker and therefore I don't feel too comfortable interpreting others speaking just like me in a foreign language.

 

Also congrats for your approach to again not provide schematics for R2 but just a PDF with components’ values and names removed so that it's more or less useless. It works. People are happy getting no information. Mission accomplished.

 

Please feel encouraged to continue as you do today, it works obviously (no need for improvement). Never thought I could watch this happen here.

[JohnnyWednesday]

4 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

 

I did not say there was, I was addressing your assertions that they were useless to software developers, in case anyone had a similar opinion or hadn't considered it before.  Now, let's all bring the combative nonsense and slander down a notch, shall we?  

 

   

My apologies - you're quite right, forgive me. I got frustrated and I shouldn't have.

I just feel that refusing to even consider it on grounds completely unrelated to the design and resources available? is unreasonable and stinks of petty bias.

So the company wasn't the model of open source perfection in the past - so what? neither is almost every tech company in the world - pretty sure Linux runs on Intel chips.

 They're working hard and have really improved matters - isn't that what people wanted?

I see no technical reason why this board shouldn't be assessed. It's been released, we have schematics, data sheet, source. You've got a developer right here with the board willing to provide information and work on support.

So somebody please, with all the sincerity I can muster - tell me what's holding this up without bringing up the past.

[JohnnyWednesday]

Or is the official stance of the Armbian team : "do things exactly how we want or not only will we not bother to support your boards, we'll go out of our way to insult your company at every turn, on our forums, your forums and anywhere else that even mentions your products"?

If that's the case? then that's your prerogative but please let me know so I can spend the next week making sure that everybody else knows it too.

[Lion Wang]

Spoiler

 

10 hours ago, tkaiser said:

 

Do what you want.

 

 

Care to remember when I started this thread here? On June 23th. Back at that time there existed ZERO publicly available INFORMATION wrt Banana Pi R2. I wasted my time to poke the vendor over and over again to provide information, to release schematics (which they didn't since they don't understand why it's important to provide schematics if you're not able to provide technical documentation or any correct information) and to release sources. Care to remember for what this vendor is famous and why this was important?

 

I was interested in this MT7623 device from the very beginning at the moment I realized Mediatek started to open themselves (that's the reason I asked maybe 30 times over in the Banana forum to show us the existence of sources since MTK was known to only provide sources for insane amounts of money JUST UNTIL RECENTLY. Of course everybody has forgotten this now). Care to remember that everything that was available 7 weeks ago was 'wait and see', 'we finish all driver now and github then', 'why you so crazy, give us time'.

 

7 weeks ago I got the guy responsible for the mess in Banana forum posting as 'bpi sinovoip team' to provide a boot log, started to analyze the information therein which led to my account over there being banned and many of my posts including this analysis deleted, and decided to provide the information gathered here since SinoVoip is obviously still not able to provide technical documentation worth the name or any real information at all (since you never know if it's just copy&paste gone wrong or something real).

 

Well, today we know that MTK is providing a BSP without the need to sign an NDA or having to pay for sources, today we know they're actively upstreaming patches to get this SoC and board supported by mainline Linux, today we know that their coders/engineers try to fill SinoVoip's gap over at their forum answering technical questions. Care to remember how the situation looked like 7 weeks ago?

 

Do what you want! I really don't want to waste any more time with this Banana mess (since I wasted already so much time trying to support them and their hardware even if they send out broken dev samples, install a Dunning-Kruger guy between them and the outside, don't inform us about important changes and so on). And you're absolutely right: they prove that they're not able to improve in any important area. They simply don't get the idea why false advertising is wrong, why providing false information is wrong, why babbling about open source is wrong when you're keeping everything closed at the same time, why it's wrong to be disrespectful to open source community (care to remember how they deal with this pull request and so many others?) and so on.

 

 

please note below:

1, you look at all your statements, whether it's for any banana a product, how terrible it is, and why we should pay attention to someone who makes me feel sick. 

2. Look at all the statements you made on armbian BBS, and everyone thinks you are the face of armbian.I even think of you are one of orange PI member .You're out of your normal moral compass.You may never learn to respect others. 

3,note ,you are not a god for arm community.

 

PS:  i want to know , why you always attack us , what can you get or what are you want to get .

 

Edited August 17, 2017 by Tido
added spoiler - very long 'quote'

[Nora Lee]

Tks for some Armbian devlopers' feekback and good advice that is real SBC spirit to assist Banana Pi HW and SW progress. We improve HW in order to achieve max. performance by our customers' requirement as well as developers welcome that too. 

 

Happy to hear many developers give us positive comment and would like to support R2 development. Once we have new models, we'll notice sooner.

 

 

 

 

[Lion Wang]

we now main working on Linux 4.4, this is our development in progress , now about issue for kernel 4.4 

 

have support :

 

1. support HDMI
2. support GMAC * 5 (2 real GE ports, 1 is WAN port, another is connected to 4 LAN ports)
3. support SATA * 2
4. support eMMC (support boot from eMMC)
5. support IR
6. support OTG
7. support PWM (PWM1/PWM2/PWM3, PWM4 and PWM5 are not supported)
8. support USB 3.0 * 2
9. support mPCIe

 

issue: 

 

1：wifi  driver for MTK6625L

2：VPU&GPU 

3：MIPI driver

 

update : launcher have running success on linux 4.4 kernel ,maybe wifi will ready soon ,it is a hard work

 

 

i will let gary add this group ,and he will maybe answer more .

[TonyMac32]

Perhaps as an aid to our mutual understanding, would it be possible to link to a schematic and all released technical documents here, and provide an up to date image/layout of the board?  I see a few things on the Banana Pi site that are... awkward.  There are at least 2 revisions of the board on display with different port layouts, and the power jack next to the microUSB is labelled as "12 V"  is that accurate?  I don't know what that PMIC is off hand, so I'd be very unlikely to use that power jack unless you provided the adapter. 

 

I think there is potential, however I am an automotive engineer, everything document I make must be defensible in a court of law, so I am very specific and I require a lot of verified documentation. 

 

I am by no means looking for perfection, but it should be accurate enough that I can

1. Follow it without destroying the device
2. Compile a generic linux without relying explicitly on your repo.
3. Observe something near the advertised performance specs during empirical testing
4. Identify all the right parts found in documentation.

We need a thread where @Lion Wang @Nora Lee and @sean.wang are following and replying as is needed.  We are not asking any questions that should be unexpected, most vendors provide schematics and most vendors have reasonably accurate datasheets.  Our feedback should be very carefully considered, we are an educated user base, something development teams almost never have access to.  We have people that use these single board computers in industrial and other applications, when they say "It would be really great if..."  They know what they're talking about.

 

Now, I do not speak for the team, I only speak for myself and hopefully as a sane and intelligent individual:  My recommendation on getting Armbian support for boards is to come here, reach out to the Armbian community, and provide accurate and complete documents, ask us questions, listen to our answers, etc.

 

Lion_Wang, the figure you posted shows WiFi + BT as OK, but you say it isn't complete.  I see it's listed as AP6212 here, but on the R2 manual it says:  " banana pi BPI-R2 have support MTK6625L wifi&BT 4.1 chip onboard. "  <---  That is the sort of thing that causes trouble and upsets people.

 

The schematics are better than nothing, but they are scrubbed of IC names, values, etc, so really there is a limit to what value they are.  I do at least see +12V being specified there, and consistently through, so OK.  I was bracing myself for magic smoke everywhere...

[chwe]

2 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

Lion_Wang, the figure you posted shows WiFi + BT as OK, but you say it isn't complete.  I see it's listed as AP6212 here, but on the R2 manual it says:  " banana pi BPI-R2 have support MTK6625L wifi&BT 4.1 chip onboard. "  <---  That is the sort of thing that causes trouble and upsets people

Cause you find this table on the friendly Arm wiki...

 

[TonyMac32]

6 minutes ago, chwe said:

Cause you find this table on the friendly Arm wiki...

 

Well shit.

[Lion Wang]

51 minutes ago, TonyMac32 said:

Lion_Wang, the figure you posted shows WiFi + BT as OK, but you say it isn't complete.  I see it's listed as AP6212 here, but on the R2 manual it says:  " banana pi BPI-R2 have support MTK6625L wifi&BT 4.1 chip onboard. "  <---  That is the sort of thing that causes trouble and upsets people.

it is some issue for wifi&BT driver on kernel 4.4 , we must  let all code can compile at first. then we can try to fixed driver issue.  we want begin at kernel 4.4 .x， it easy to get mainline support .   

[tkaiser]

2 hours ago, TonyMac32 said:

Lion_Wang, the figure you posted shows WiFi + BT as OK, but you say it isn't complete.  I see it's listed as AP6212 here, but on the R2 manual it says:  " banana pi BPI-R2 have support MTK6625L wifi&BT 4.1 chip onboard. "  <---  That is the sort of thing that causes trouble and upsets people.

 

Especially since it's the same since ever or let's say since we have to deal with these guys (in the beginning when Foxconn let LeMaker do the support/software/documentation job for the original Bananas it was different, then LeMaker got greedy, applied for Banana trademarks and has been kicked out... since then we suffer from total ignorance). 

 

Please look at https://archive.is/tY9gt -- the copy&paste monkey they hired to run the forum and fill their gitbook resources with random nonsense fetched a table from FriendlyELEC wiki where a responsible vendor describes their internal engineer's work to move away from Allwinner BSP to mainline Linux kernel (the result of an email conversation between them and us which even led to hardware improvements once FriendlyELEC realized that mainline kernel allows for DVFS unlike BSP). Now they garnish this with some sentences mentioning MTK/R2, add a screenshot and make a forum post out of it. The sole purpose is to create the impression of some 'hard work' being done and to feature this forum post on G+ and Facebook where a clueless crowd applauds.

 

And in the meantime this sort of advertising happens even here. It's unbelievable especially that these guys don't get it why lies are wrong, that correct information/specifications are important and so on. That's such basic stuff but they simply don't give a sh*t about this at all since years while at the same time whining about 'people attacking us'. And their ignorance totally shields them from reality.

 

Edit: 'Lion_Wang, the figure you posted' has been removed by him now. Guess why. The same game they play since years now happening even in Armbian forum, really unbelievable.

[Lion Wang]

3 hours ago, tkaiser said:

Edit: 'Lion_Wang, the figure you posted' has been removed by him now. Guess why. The same game they play since years now happening even in Armbian forum, really unbelievable.

i am not do development now . more than 7 years , so , i make a mistake .  i will let gary join this discuss . 

 

anymore , i not  badger with you, you can do everything if you like .  i also do banana pi ,  this is my love.  even it make you not happy , I have chosen to ignore you for more than a year.  you want me still ???

 

 

[JohnnyWednesday]

Right - we have a dialogue with the vendor, we know why some people are unhappy and we know what's needed to assess the board. There's a language barrier and there are elements of documentation that have changed or are incomplete. Not every tiny thing is clear but certainly enough is clear to make a start. The vendor wants to help, they're here right now trying to. Let's stop going on about the past, things change - if they don't then I'd like an apology from Thomas for killing my grandfather in world war 2.

I've got this board, I'll answer questions to the best of my ability. It's running, it's stable, it's definitely more achievable than some boards that have been bought up in the past for Armbian.
 

• The R2 uses a 12v supply with a 2.1 x 5.5 mm connector - at least a 2 amp supply is needed. 
• The first production batch is board revision v1.1. It has two upright SATA ports, a 4 pin power connector to the one side of the SATA ports, a 2 pin power connector between the SATA ports and a molex branded clip to hold full length mPCIe cards - mounting holes are present for half length cards - standard risers of 2mm height, 2mm width should be used for half length cards.
• This is what the v1.1 of the board looks like :
  
  
• The WIFI/BT chip is the MT6625L - it may be the case that they used a different chip in a previous revision - I don't know, but the manual says MT6625L - the chip says MT6625L. I've searched high and low on google - I can't find AP6212 in reference to this board. If you're upset by this then please elaborate because I might be missing something obvious.
• The 6 pin connector for the battery appears to be a micro JST SH connector with a 1mm pin spacing. I have such plugs and they fit, I will ask the vendor for confirmation. In the meantime, here is a page where the connector I have can be purchased (http://www.hobbyrc.co.uk/jst-sh-6-pin-connectors-10mm-pin-spacing-w-150mm-wires)
• Here is a link to the current logical schematic for this board - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4PAo2nW2KfnbVZzeDJERGd2SDg/view?usp=sharing
• Here is a link to the current physical layout of the board - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4PAo2nW2KfnenRRNGhmc29IZ2c/view?usp=sharing
• Here is a link to the datasheet for the MT7623N - https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_YnvHgh2rwjR3pwSzNrS1Nqdjg/view?usp=sharing
• If you need to know the ID of certain chips, please ask me and I'll tell you what's written on the chips I have.
• Here is a link to the github of the R2-BSP kernel. U-boot sources are also in this repository - https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-R2-bsp
• Here are some patchwork links to various developers currently working on drivers/patches for Mediatek chips :
  https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/?submitter=169671
  https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/?submitter=13291
  https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/?submitter=166241
  https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/?submitter=133171
  https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-mediatek/list/?submitter=171503
  (This list may not be exhaustive)
• Here is a link to the BPI-R2 section of the Banana Pi forum - http://forum.banana-pi.org/c/Banana-Pi-BPI-R2
• The board is incapable of time travel, opening portals to other dimensions or fixing failed marriages. Hopefully this isn't a problem.

[chwe]

To all: Please stop immediately to throw dirt to others. It's worthless and don't make this thread readable.

 

 

8 hours ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

I've got this board, I'll answer questions to the best of my ability. It's running, it's stable, it's definitely more achievable than some boards that have been bought up in the past for Armbian.

I appreciate your short summary of information. This might be useful for everyone starting with this board. Some questions which comes to my mind:

• Can you provide us a recent boot log from your board? (with a link/description to the image you use)
• Did you try to connect a SSD or HDD to the native sata ports on the R2 (long time ago, sinovoipbpi team claimed that it works with a pcie to sata board but i never saw it runnig on the native sata ports on the board, maybe I missed it). 
• Can this power up the R2 be seen as solved? (solved means to me: plug in power and it starts or press max. one button to start it)

• 16 hours ago, Lion Wang said:

  support eMMC (support boot from eMMC)

  Can you confirm that this works now? I only have in mind that there were some issues about booting from eMMC

8 hours ago, JohnnyWednesday said:

The WIFI/BT chip is the MT6625L - it may be the case that they used a different chip in a previous revision - I don't know, but the manual says MT6625L - the chip says MT6625L. I've searched high and low on google - I can't find AP6212 in reference to this board. If you're upset by this then please elaborate because I might be missing something obvious.

The confusion came up when @Lion Wang shared a table with their efforts of the 4.4 kernel. This table describes that AP6212 works fine. @TonyMac32 was confused because obviously there's no AP6212 on this board. The same table can be found on the wiki of friendly arm, where they describe the status of a H3 device. Lion Wang removed it immediately and replaced it with this new list.

Spoiler

16 hours ago, Lion Wang said:

• support HDMI
• support GMAC * 5 (2 real GE ports, 1 is WAN port, another is connected to 4 LAN ports)
• support SATA * 2
• support eMMC (support boot from eMMC)
• support IR
• support OTG
• support PWM (PWM1/PWM2/PWM3, PWM4 and PWM5 are not supported)
• support USB 3.0 * 2
• support mPCIe