from Hacker News

Banana Pi BPI-RV2 RISC-V gateway board

by ofrzeta on 4/19/25, 11:37 AM with 28 comments

  • by stragies on 4/21/25, 9:44 AM

    How "trustworthy" is the "dedicated network processing accelerator (NPU) (supports L2/L3 hardware processing, IPv4/IPv6 dual stack, 20Gbps switching capacity, full byte wire-speed forwarding)"? Is it fully "hardware", auditable, or does/could it run some blob firmware with unknown/undocumented "features"?

  • by camel-cdr on 4/21/25, 9:44 AM

    FYI, the previous (probably more expensive) Banana Pi BPI-F3 is faster and has more cores. This one has 4 C908 cores @1.25GHz with VLEN=128 and the BPI-F3 has 8 X60 cores @1.6GHz with VLEN=256.

    Both are simple in-order cores and they are likely even based on the same predicessor implementation.

    Edit: Actually, I don't know the VLEN, but previous boards with C908 had 128-bit vectors. The IP is configurable, so it could also have a larger VLEN, or no vector support at all.

    Edit2: It might be no vector support at all, since the device tree doesn't list support for the "V" extension: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-RV2-SF21H8898-OPENWRT-BS...

  • by sylware on 4/19/25, 11:55 AM

    RISC-V new hardware is alway good news. Waiting for this ultra-performance RISC-V 64bits implementation using state of the art silicon process.

    But here, has the USB controller a device mode?

  • by a012 on 4/21/25, 7:14 AM

    It looks good on paper, but more importantly if it couldn’t run on mainline Linux kernel I won’t buy it

  • by teleforce on 4/21/25, 9:55 AM

    More user friendly details here with the estimated price of only USD$35! [1].

    [1] Banana Pi BPI-RV2 Gateway Board Integrates Siflower SF21H8898 RISC-V SoC

    https://linuxgizmos.com/banana-pi-bpi-rv2-gateway-board-inte...

  • by nottorp on 4/21/25, 9:52 AM

    nvme ssd slot...

    Hear that, you arm vendors? You can have a low power board without being stuck with crap microsd storage...

  • by mrlonglong on 4/21/25, 9:59 AM

    Why not have 5 x 2.5GBe ports rather than 5 5 x 1GBe ports?

  • by Havoc on 4/21/25, 9:04 AM

    Can definitely see riscv taking this segment of the market over completely in record time. Consumer routers, pro-sumer managed switches, wifi APs etc.

  • by fbn79 on 4/21/25, 6:33 AM

    Would be great to have an option with more LAN Ports.

  • by pjmlp on 4/21/25, 6:37 AM

    The specs look like my multimedia Athlon XP PC from 2002, talk about embedded not being powerful enough.

  • by rwmj on 4/21/25, 9:23 AM

    512 MB of RAM is low, even for a board intended as a router/gateway.