This Banana Pi new device just appeared on their wiki on Agust 18.
Banana Pi BPI-M2S - Banana Pi Wiki (banana-pi.org)
Seems very interesting for OpenWrt community.
Can this be easily added into existing dev support ?
no it's not easy to add because it is using an Amlogic chip and there is no target (group of devices using this chip) for that in OpenWrt so you would need to create a whole new target and Amlogic chip kernel patches and whatnot.
If it was using Allwinner chip it's either already supported or easy to support (copy-paste code from another similar device)
I noticed there was no target, I am not a dev, but being ARM based, wouldn't most of the code of an existing target be usable ?
No, mainline kernel support for AMLogic is somewhere between bad and non-existent.
Amlogic chip is not just CPU. It contains CPU, ram controller, GPU, USB controllers, Ethernet controllers, SD card controller and more things, depending on model. More or less every port on the board comes from the Amlogic chip
Allwinner chip is not just CPU, again it contains more things. They are not the same as the ones in Amlogic and use different drivers. You cannot just copy that, it will not work.
Proper support for Amlogic means that OpenWrt can use all these ports and devices from the Amlogic chip.
So why would they use this CPU ?
Doesn't make sense if there is no ecosystem...
Cheap, available, capable for multimedia purposes - 'just' use the vendor kernel and SDK and never change/ update it…
I would have though Banana was more strategic than this.
No producer of single board computers seems to understand this, they just make their own firmware image using the hardware vendor SDK for kernel, and for them it is OK like that.
Support for Allwinner chips in Linux (that is used in OpenWrt) was done by a third party project not sponsored in any way by any of the single board computer manufacturers. https://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page
For Rockchip chips, the vendor themselves publishes sources and documentation http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Main_Page
For Amlogic there is no such thing, some sources for some things in random github accounts, some documentation for others.
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Armbian now supports A311D on Vim3
It might be interesting to try and support this now? The BPI-CM4 could be a good base for powerful routers