the kernels in the SDK provided by the SoC or board manufacturer don't necessarily match up with what we have in OpenWrt - many SDKs are still built on 5.10 or even earlier kernels which is a no-go for trunk.
board manufacturers are free to do what they want in their trees, while getting a board or SoC supported in OpenWrt is a) more strict, b) the additional packages need to build for other targets as well, c) there is not much appetite in a GPU accelerator or a murky camera driver in mainline OpenWrt, as this is a router platform. Dumping (trying to dump) a DTS from an SDK into trunk and pulling in an SDK source in full won't work for mainline.
board manufacturers time after time say "XYZ board/router supports OpenWrt", which causes users to turn to us for support, while supporting a board that has an ancient kernel running ancient OpenWrt (not the case for the R2S of course) is out of our remits.
also, just lightly touching on the fact that most of the OpenWrt developers are not paid for their community efforts - which in turn means a longer timeframe (if there is interest at all) for getting hardware support upstream.
As always, we're happy to help and/or guide vendors to integrate their stuff into mainline, but that's a longer process and it's too late to start "when the device is released to the public".
What I find compelling about this RV2 board is not its compute but its dual GigE and relatively easy potential for dual radios, combined with ample RAM. I'm interested in finding a somewhat compact mobile router that I can stick between sketchy (hotel/cafe/…) WiFi and my device(s), that can also run Pi-Hole in a container. It's nice that this board is also not super expensive.
I'm not an expert at this but it looks like getting these supported is quite possible. I have a OrangePI rv2 myself which is basically the exact same board as the r2s but instead of the extra 2x 2.5g ports it has 2x pcie 2.0 x2 lane M.2 b/m key slots and and sdcard slot.
It was actually pretty easy to compile a new kernel and have it work with the ubuntu image. A 6.15.x kernel was easy to get up and running without too much trouble just using trees from https://github.com/jmontleon/linux-bianbu/branches it's ironic that 6.12 isn't there but I assume it wouldn't be impossible for it to work. I'm not sure about u-boot.
One of the good things about these boards compared to the Visionfive2 is you can make multiple vlan interfaces off the 1 gig ports. I dunno, I think I would still prefer the version without the extra ethernets, unless I had 2.5g internet or something. Though who knows, maybe they are strong enough to run a nas off or something but I assume you'd start paying a little bit more for that. The 1 gig ports don't seem to support setting the MTU even 1 byte above 1500 though and there may be a benefit from using jumbo mtus with these cpus though the bottleneck I see below may be from something else.
The thing with the onboard ports as well is in my opinion it's better to have intel nic igc i22x ports vs the realtek ones, but I don't think this board supports MSI / MSI-x properly so the advantage you get from using the intel nics just doing that by default isn't there anyway.
eg..
[ 20.037366] e1000e 0001:01:00.0 enP1p1s0: MSI interrupt test failed, using legacy interrupt.
According to some benchmarks, the Ky X1 (Almost equivalent to the SpacemiT K1) is about the same as a Raspberry Pi 3 in single core performance. Will it actually be able to route 2.5GbE?
NanoPi (ARM)'s SoC was launched early, has a large market share, and is widely used. As a result, the probability of submitting upstream code is naturally high, which is a gradual process.
RISC-V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA) that gradually improves its upstream code development stage, relying on everyone to port or contribute code upstream together.
A router is not all about CPU performance, the I/O side (ethernet/ switch drivers, offloading, etc.) matters a lot more than the CPU itself. There's no alternative to actually testing the SOC/ device for the intended purpose.
I just got the R2S anyone know the default credentials for the bainbu system installed on the EMMC from factory? I am also able to test any image people need help with.
