FriendlyARM NanoPi R4S

Hi to all! It’s Christmas time!

FriendlyARM has relesead a new board, please have a look at:
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=284
https://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R4S

Features: Rockchip RK3399 + 1GB or 4 GB + dual Gbps Ethernet + 2x USB 3.0. The board size is 6.6 x 6.6 mm

In my opinion this board is better than Raspberry Pi 4b as home firewall, due to two real eth interfaces.

Happy New Years
Paolo

Usually I wouldn’t agree because it’s used to lack of RAM, but this time this can be an option.

However I don’t think this hardware is supported.

It is theoretically supported, I will be receiving this board by the end of January 2021 as currently it is out of stock.

I will try to add its support to ipfire.

Yes it is very much powerful than rpi and it is perfect for home firewall with medium and high load.

Happy New Year to all.

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Hi Furkan K
I am very happy reading your post!
I will wait your results…
Happy New Year!
Paolo

4GB version is in stock now.

Just ordered one so I need ipfire support soon :sweat_smile:

Hi Terry,
where did you bought it?
I’m interested too
Many thanks
Have a nice day!
Paolo

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=284

You posted the shop page of the procucts already. I ordered it from the manufacturer.

I’ve recieved one with 1gb which uses ddr3 ram built opnsense for it but has to put it to production for detailed testing.

To get ipfire to work on it we will need to patch that kernel with r4s dts while I’ve compiled mainline u-boot for both 1gb and 4gb version.

I have been super busy since my last attempt at getting rockpiE patch on ipfire.
I’ve asked friendly arm to send a 4gb version also,they will send it once they have it in stock.

Good news!!!
In my opinion this little ARM board will be quite spread at home and it will allow to use IPFire on a cheaper board than the Intel boards.
Many thanks for you work!
Happy to read you again in the future.
Paolo

Hi to all ARM fans!
Any news about the IPFire porting on Nanopi R4S?
Many thanks for your help.
Best regards
Paolo

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At he moment i have not got any self compiled u-boot on Rockchip to work yet. I have also no R4S to test and no one send me patches.

But the RPi4 already works in my kernel tree. And the R4S also has only one SoC ethernet, the second is a USB3.0 Chip.
https://people.ipfire.org/~arne_f/highly-experimental/kernel-5.10/

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Yes it works. R4S have faster cpu so that another benefit plus it is a device with good IO and case for Ipfire use.

I will check the kernel config to see if it have rockchip configs enabled :smiley:

Thank you for your hard work.

So if I load up ipfire-2.25.2gb-ext4.aarch64-full-core157.img.xz on the Raspberry Pi 4B it should work?

Dear Arne.F
if you have look at supplier web site you can see that the second ETH is managed by RTL8211E chipset and this chipset is attached to system bus.
But in any case the supplier declares on LAN1 [R8111H] 934 Mbps in tx and 936 Mbps in rx. Completely similar values on LAN2 [RTL8211E] with 934 Mbps in tx and 941 Mbps in rx.

Many thanks to all for your hard work.
Ciao
Paolo

https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=284

Sorry. You are correct. I have mixed up the board. R2S was the one with the USB3 LAN.

Dear Arne.F
don’t worry!
Ciao
Paolo

Good afternoon.

Is anything known about this? It seems that it is a little stopped :slightly_frowning_face:.

Greetings and thanks.

R4S or R2S?
R2S works fine.

I couldn’t test R4S as its been used as production firewall on opnsense. I have been waiting for friendlyarm to send me R4S 4gb version but they seem busy or out of stock due to chip shortage haven’t heard from them since long time.

If anyone have R4S then they can test it with their custom uboot and dtb as i dont think 5.10 have R4S dtb

Hi @spikerguy.

Could something be done with this? I have a R4S and a R2C.

https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/device-tree/rockchip/

or

https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/arm64/daily/u-boot/

The R4S does not show anything at startup.
The perfect R2C minus the WAN interface which I think uses the YT8521S chip. It gives an error like the interface is busy.

Thank you.

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