New to building from source (Banana Pi R2 board)

n007 · October 27, 2020, 5:27am

Hi,

I'm having trouble understanding a few steps in the firmware building process.
I prepared my build system, but stuck on the git clone part. What am I cloning?
For example, I want to build an image for Banana Pi R2 board using the latest OpenWRT version, v19.x.x. So, what do I clone? What would be the first two or three statements that I type. That's all I need for now to get started.

Thank You

hnyman · October 27, 2020, 5:39am

You would clone the whole OpenWrt got repo, which contains all current branches: master, 1907, ...

After cloning, you can checkout the openwrt-19.07 branch, so that you will build its toolchain.

n007 · October 27, 2020, 7:23am

Thank you. Now getting somewhere. I'm in the makefile for BPI-R2, I don't see U-boot listed in the "bootloader" section when I select my board. There are some old files listed in this branch:

https://github.com/garywangcn/bpi-r2_lede

How do I go about including U-boot in this build? The board doesn't have any onboard U-Boot, everything has to part of the firmware image.

hnyman · October 27, 2020, 8:20am

You are trying to use a fourth-party repo that is 2-3 years old. Pretty ancient and strange.
That has little to do with the current OpenWrt...

Why are you not using the normal Openwrt at git.openwrt.org ???
(or the Github mirror https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt )

There should be quite normal support for Banana Pi R2 nowadays. No reason to use some ancient fork.

github.com

openwrt/openwrt/blob/master/target/linux/mediatek/image/mt7623.mk#L40


      
          #   |   MBR partition #2   |
          #   |                      |
          #   |       Recovery       |
          #   .                      .
          #   .     (uImage.FIT)     .
          #   |                      |
          #   |----------------------|
          #   |   MBR partition #3   |
          #   |                      |
          #   |      Production      |
          #   |                      |
          #   |     (uImage.FIT,     |
          #   .     rootfs_Data.)    .
          #   .                      .
          #   |                      |
          #   ------------------------
          #
          # For eMMC boot, everything up to and including the preloader must be
          # written to /dev/mmcblk0boot0, with the SDMMC_BOOT header changed to
          # read EMMC_BOOT\0 instead.
          #

n007 · October 27, 2020, 2:57pm

Thank you. That's what I thought, but why my bootloader screen is empty? I cloned the full OpenWRT and updated the sources before starting the makefile.

hnyman · October 27, 2020, 3:04pm

I have no experience with Banana Pi, but for 99% of routers, all needed packages are included by default.

Basically you just need to select the correct device, and all needed packages get selected automatically.

Is there actually u-boot support for that device?
(Or is some other bootloader used for it in OpenWrt?)

n007 · October 27, 2020, 3:28pm

Unlike most boards, the BPI-R2 doesn't come with any bootloader at all, so the board doesn't even start if it's not there. I found the uboot bootloader files on this page.

https://downloads.openwrt.org/snapshots/targets/mediatek/mt7623/

I know the following files are required, but don't know how to incorporate them in the build so they appear in the above Boot loader menu screen.

bpi_bananapi-r2-preloader.bin
u-boot-mt7623a_unielec_u7623/
u-boot-mt7623n_bpir2/

wmane · July 2, 2023, 5:47am

nut sure if this helps, because every step with this bad boy is quite convoluted lol:
Getting Started with R2PRO - Banana Pi Wiki (banana-pi.org)

frollic · July 2, 2023, 7:56am

R2 <> R2Pro