And I'm wondering, what is the actual state of support for this board ?
Quick run down of this board
Rockchip RK3568 cpu, 2gb ram, 16gb nvram, dual gigabit NIC, one has a 4 port switch (vlan capable ? not sure)
It has an M.2 slot E keyed, 1x mini pcie, hdmi port, battery backed RTC, 2x MIPI DSI, 1x MIPI CSI, 2x USB3 + 1x USB3 OTG
H.265 + H.264 video encoder AND decoder (hmm that's crazy, I bet they're impossible to use though)
audio in and out, smart card reader (sim), microsd
It appears to come in two layouts
They cost between 100-130$ CAD with shipping to Canada
So what is the deal with these things ?
My primary concern, how much of these even has open source drivers ?
It's of course useless garbage if we can't update the kernel.
I highly suspect most of the hardware needs binary blobs and will quickly become ewaste but who knows !
They have the reputation of creating good boards with attractive specs, but in the end there is no support and you are left alone on a raft with all the problems that appear afterwards.
by the way, there is no official support from openwrt for the BPI R2, as the BPI-R3 will be released soon, and it will be in the same situation.
A quick Google-search would indicate that most of the peripherals on the RK3568 work with mainline-kernel, but hardware-accelerated crypto is apparently missing, video-output and PCIe-support is wonky/broken and video-encode/-decode is basically nonexistent -- then again, that seems to be a common theme with basically all ARM SoCs.
RK35XX is designed to be used in settop boxes for video playback, no hardware NAT included AFAK, so I think if you have one already you can try tinkering it with openwrt, otherwise it's not worth to buy as your main router.
That being said, I have one amlogic S905X3 box served as a secondary router running aria2 and docker images, which I think is a better application.
It took about two years for a OpenWrt version for the BPI-R2 ... and four years after the BPI-R2 release, the OpenWrt version for it works very well.
Thus, count on around two years for the first usable version of OpenWrt for the BPI-R2 Pro. In the meantime, there may be downloads available from the Banana Pie developers. However, any of these downloads will be very painful.
