Banana Pi sbc with five ethernet ports for building open source router appears

The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro has been released. This single-board computer includes an Arm quad-core SoC and five RJ45 connections for gigabit Ethernet. This makes the sbc suitable for making a router.

The BPI-R2 Pro is at AliExpress appeared, noted CNX Software. The single-board computer cost $95 there, but is currently sold out. The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro includes a Rockchip RK3568 soc with four Arm Cortex-A55 coers at 2GHz. The sbc also has 2GB Lpddr4 memory and 16GB eMMC storage as standard, although variants with more memory and storage are also sold.

The Banana Pi also has five ports for gigabit Ethernet. One of them is intended as a poor connection and the rest functions as a LAN connector. Users can use the sbc as a router. The Banana Pi BPI-R2 Pro currently supports Ubuntu 21.04, OpenWrt 21.02, and Debian 10, all of which run version 4.19 of the Linux kernel. CNX Software writes that the Rockchip RK3568-soc has recently also received support for the more recent Linux 5.14 kernel.

The BPI-R2 Pro does not have a built-in module for WiFi and Bluetooth, which was the case with the original BPI-R2. Users can add their own M.2 or mPCIe WiFi module. The single-board computer also has a SATA connection, a 3.5 mm jack, two USB 3.0 type A connections and an HDMI output.