[Freedombox-discuss] Banana Pi BPI-R2

[Stefan Monnier]

>    I was going through the Debian Micronews RSS feed and I stumbled upon
> the 2017 Freedombox progress report. While I was reading through it, I
> noticed that the Banana Pro board was mentioned. So, I did some research
> on Banana Pi and I came came across a neat board that I think would make
> a great Freedombox. Considering that one of the goals of Freedombox is
> to serve as a router, I think the Banana Pi BPI-R2 would be a great
> board for it because in addition to having 2 SATA ports and two USB 3.0
> ports, it also has 5 ethernet ports (including WAN).

I hadn't noticed they came out with an "R2".  The previous BPI-R1
suffered from fairly disappointing performance and was plagued with
power problems.  Also its ethernet ports had the problem that at boot
they started as "just one big dumb switch" so until the OS finally
configures the switch, your WAN is connected directly to your LAN, which
leads to all kinds of problems.

According to https://forum.armbian.com/topic/4567-banana-pi-r2/
the R2 will also suffer from poor performance on the wifi side at least
and probably on the SATA side as well.  And the software support is
likely to suck for a good while, since the manufacturer doesn't
understand what it needs to do.

This said, maybe 2 years from now it could turn into an acceptable
board, what with mini-pcie and such.


        Stefan