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Banana Pi R2 Pro

FreeBSD on the Rockchip RK3568 router board — switch works, the board routes

Working Rockchip RK3568 Source →

The board

Hardware Banana Pi R2 Pro
SoC Rockchip RK3568, quad Cortex-A55 @ 2.0 GHz
Switch MediaTek MT7531BE — 5x GbE (1 WAN, 4 LAN)
Storage eMMC, microSD, SATA III, SPI flash
Expansion M.2, mPCIe, 2x USB 3.0

An RK3568 with a MediaTek switch bolted on: a Rockchip board that is really a router. That split is also why it took so long — it needs both halves working.

What works

The board routes. Not “it boots and prints something to serial” — it does the job it was bought for:

  • MT7531 switch driver — the built-in switch is up, patches merged into the arena branch
  • Switching, port config and forwarding are operational, so NAT and normal pf setups work in practice
  • Deployable as a home router, a lab router, or an embedded networking platform

What is not done

Honest state of things:

  • The switch implementation carries several temporary hacks and workarounds that are known to be sub-optimal. They work; they are not what goes upstream.
  • PCIe is disabled — there is a bug that has not been chased down yet.
  • The switch support is still marked experimental in the commit history, and it deserves the label until someone else with an R2 Pro verifies it.

Boot

U-Boot for this board is packaged as u-boot-bananapi-r2-pro (bpi-r2-pro-rk3568_defconfig) in our ports tree, so you get a bootable image without building the boot chain yourself. If you brick it, rkdeveloptool is packaged too.

Where the work happens

This is the arena that started SoCBSD — ten months of one person carrying a board that existed in a fork and nowhere else. It is now open: the cleanup, the PCIe bug, and everything still missing are work anyone who owns an R2 Pro can pick up.