BPI-R3 general questions

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hey,

I've played around with my new Banana PI R3 (https://openwrt.org/toh/sinovoip/bananapi_bpi-r3) and got some questions before doing the final/production-setup:

  • How can I clear nor, nand and emmc to not leave some old installs of my tests behind? (from https://openwrt.org/toh/sinovoip/bananapi_bpi_r3_v1.0_v1.1#flash_layout I would assume I need to wipe mmcblk0 in nand with emm jumper, and mtd*/mtdblock* with jumpers all up - sdcard)
  • I'm thinking about installing openwrt to emmc (prefered but only 200MB storage after install?) or nand and use emmc as additional storage what would you recommend?
  • If I install it on emmc I don't want to leave an old installation on nand behind, can I just clear nand after successful install?
  • What's the best way to make use of the 8GB on the emmc?
  • Whats the max root-fs size I can use for emmc to still have sysupgrade to work? (as it's tempfs/in-ram I suspect below 2GB?)
  • What are the difference in the images (https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=23.05.2&target=mediatek%2Ffilogic&id=bananapi_bpi-r3) for nand/nor/emmc if I can flash from the sd-card image through to nand and from nand to emmc without usb needed? (like described here https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Getting_Started_with_BPI-R3#How_to_burn_image_to_SD_card)
  • What are the minimum required packages to add to the image to be able to mount ext4 or fat32 USB? (currently: block-mount e2fsprogs kmod-fs-ext4 kmod-usb-storage kmod-usb2 kmod-usb3 usbutils)

Appreciate any Help :v:

2

Output of mtd list in uboot (emmc):
Output of nand list: (seems to be same):

* spi-nand0
  - device: spi_nand@1
  - parent: spi@1100a000
  - driver: spi_nand
  - path: /spi@1100a000/spi_nand@1
  - type: NAND flash
  - block size: 0x20000 bytes
  - min I/O: 0x800 bytes
  - OOB size: 64 bytes
  - OOB available: 24 bytes
  - 0x000000000000-0x000008000000 : "spi-nand0"
          - 0x000000000000-0x000000080000 : "bl2"
          - 0x000000080000-0x000000380000 : "factory"
          - 0x000000380000-0x000000580000 : "fip"
          - 0x000000580000-0x000008000000 : "ubi"

It seems I'm able to clear with:

MT7986> mtd erase bl2
MT7986> mtd erase factory
MT7986> mtd erase fip
MT7986> mtd erase ubi
MT7986> mtd erase spi-nand0

don't know if all then "mtd erase spi-nand0" is needed though?

3

I found mmc / mmcinfo which gives me access to the emmc:

Device: mmc@11230000
Manufacturer ID: 11
OEM: 0
Name: 008GB0
Bus Speed: 52000000
Mode: MMC High Speed (52MHz)
Rd Block Len: 512
MMC version 5.1
High Capacity: Yes
Capacity: 7.3 GiB
Bus Width: 8-bit
Erase Group Size: 512 KiB
HC WP Group Size: 4 MiB
User Capacity: 7.3 GiB WRREL
Boot Capacity: 4 MiB ENH
RPMB Capacity: 4 MiB ENH
Boot area 0 is not write protected
Boot area 1 is not write protected

but unsure how to use the mmc erase with "blk# cnt" - I think I found the solution:

mmc read 0x0 0x7fffffff 1
MMC read: dev # 0, block # 2147483647, count 1 ... MMC: block number 0x80000000 exceeds max(0xe90000)

gives me the max blocks of the emmc, then I can do:

mmc erase 0x0 0xe90000

is that correct?