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Infix Compatible Boards

Posted Updated
By Joachim Wiberg
7 min read

Much thanks to the solid foundation curated by Buildroot, Infix can quite easily be ported to any system that supports Linux. The only real hardware requirement is “enough” RAM and storage, and if the board has a built-in switch, that it is supported by switchdev.

Currently the following boards are fully supported. Other boards have been known to work, but have not been updated or tested continuously.

Board Arch Since Notes
Banana Pi BPi-R3 Aarch64 v25.09  
Banana Pi BPi-R3 Mini Aarch64 v26.02  
Banana Pi BPi-R64 Aarch64 v26.03  
FriendlyELEC NanoPi R2S Aarch64 v24.02 Fully supported in v24.08
Marvell CN9130 CRB Aarch64 v23.06  
Microchip SAMA7G54-EK Arm v26.02  
NXP i.MX8MP EVK Aarch64 v25.02  
Raspberry Pi 4B, 3B, CM4 Aarch64 v25.05 3B and CM4 added in v25.10
Raspberry Pi 2B Arm v25.11  
StarFive VisionFive2 RISC-V v24.08  
Qemu x86_64 v23.06  

Banana Pi BPi-R3

The BPi-R3 is an affordable (€130-€150) WiFi-capable router board built around the MediaTek MT7986A (Filogic 830), a quad-core Cortex-A53 at 2.0 GHz with 2 GB DDR4 RAM.

Figure 1: Banana Pi BPi-R3.

What makes this board stand out is its networking hardware: a MediaTek MT7531A 5-port gigabit switch with full switchdev offload, plus two 2.5 Gbps SFP ports. Storage options include microSD, eMMC, and M.2 NVMe.

Infix supports all hardware features:

  • routing between interfaces
  • built-in 5-port switch with switchdev offload
  • 2.5 Gbps Ethernet and SFP connectivity
  • USB 3.0 port, microSD, eMMC, and M.2 NVMe storage
  • system LEDs and reset button
  • dual-band 802.11ax WiFi (access point and station modes)

For detailed setup instructions, see the BPi-R3 announcement.

Banana Pi BPi-R3 Mini

The BPi-R3 Mini is a more compact variant of the BPi-R3, built around the same MediaTek MT7986A (Filogic 830) SoC. It trades the R3’s SFP ports and microSD slot for a smaller form factor with 2× 2.5 Gbps RJ45 ports and 8 GB onboard eMMC.

Figure 2: Banana Pi BPi-R3 Mini.

With 2 GB DDR4 RAM, dual-band WiFi 6 (802.11ax) across two radios, and support for up to 16 virtual APs per radio, it is a natural fit as a managed WiFi AP router or wireless repeater.

Banana Pi BPi-R3 Mini

Infix supports all hardware features:

  • routing between interfaces
  • 2× 2.5 Gbps Ethernet (RJ45) connectivity
  • 8 GB onboard eMMC storage
  • USB 2.0 port
  • system LEDs and reset button
  • dual-band 802.11ax WiFi (access point and station modes)

Support for the BPi-R3 Mini was added in Infix v26.02.

Banana Pi BPi-R64

The BPi-R64 is the predecessor to the BPi-R3, built around the MediaTek MT7622, a dual-core Cortex-A53 at 1.35 GHz with 1 GB DDR3L RAM. It offers a MediaTek MT7531 5-port Gigabit switch (4× LAN + 1× WAN) with full switchdev offload, 8 GB eMMC, microSD, and a USB 3.0 port.

Figure: Banana Pi BPi-R64 with interfaces and chipsets.

Built-in WiFi is 2.4 GHz 802.11n (MT7603E), but one of the two Mini PCIe slots accepts a MediaTek MT7615 card for dual-band 802.11ac — Infix automatically prefers it when fitted.

For detailed setup and eMMC installation instructions, see the BPi-R64 announcement.

FriendlyELEC NanoPi R2S

The NanoPi R2S is a compact, affordable router board built around the Rockchip RK3328, a quad-core Cortex-A53. With two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a USB 3.0 port, and a reset button, it has everything you need for a capable home router — at a price that’s hard to beat.

Figure 3: NanoPi R2S.

Small enough to fit in a pocket yet powerful enough to handle NAT, firewalling, and VLANs at wire speed, it is an excellent choice for anyone looking to run a proper network OS at home without breaking the bank.

Infix supports all features of this device:

  • routing between interfaces
  • usb port, for storage/logging
  • reset button, incl. factory reset at power-on
  • system LEDs to indicate bootup, factory-reset, and operating mode

The board has become so popular that they’ve now made an R2S Plus with onboard eMMC, and WiFi over SDIO. Support for the Plus is coming very soon to Infix.

Figure 4: NanoPi R2S Plus Overview of functions.

There are also spin-offs on the same theme with more powerful CPUs and 2.5 Gbps Ethernet: R3S, R4S, R5S, R6S … all of which could easily be supported as well on Infix with a little bit of time and patience.

Marvell CN9130 CRB

The CN9130 CRB is a Customer Reference Board — really expensive and not easy to get hold of — but it remains the main reference for Infix so far and has seen multiple customer specific board spin-offs.

Figure 5: Marvell CN9130 CRB.

The CN9130 is a quad-core Cortex-A72 coupled with a Marvell 88E6393X 11-port switchcore (one port connected to the SoC). Only 9 of the remaining switch ports are accessible, however.

Thanks to Linux switchdev, when Infix runs on this board, all bridging (switching) configuration, including VLANs, is fully offloaded to the switchcore. Allowing full wirespeed switching between switch ports.

Microchip SAMA7G54-EK

The SAMA7G54-EK is the evaluation kit for Microchip’s SAMA7G54 SoC, an Arm Cortex-A7 processor.

Support for the SAMA7G54-EK was added in Infix v26.02.

NXP i.MX8MP EVK

The i.MX8MP EVK is NXP’s evaluation kit for the i.MX 8M Plus SoC, a quad-core Cortex-A53 at up to 1.8 GHz. Beyond its CPU cores, the SoC integrates a 2.3 TOPS Neural Processing Unit, making it a platform of interest for edge inference workloads.

The board ships with 6 GB LPDDR4 RAM, dual Gigabit Ethernet (one via the SoC’s FEC controller and one via the STMMAC/DWMAC IP block), two CAN FD ports (FlexCAN), eMMC and SD card storage, USB 3.0 (USB-C with Power Delivery), and HDMI output.

Infix supports all hardware features relevant to networking:

  • routing between the two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
  • two CAN FD interfaces (FlexCAN)
  • eMMC and SD card storage
  • USB 3.0 (USB-C with Power Delivery)
  • HDMI output

Support for the i.MX8MP EVK was added in Infix v25.02.

Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi family needs no introduction. Infix supports several models across both 32-bit and 64-bit ARM architectures:

64-bit (aarch64):

  • Pi 3B: BCM2837B0 quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 1.4 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 100 Mbps Ethernet
  • Pi 4B: BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 @ 1.5 GHz, 1-8 GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet
  • Compute Module 4: Same processor as Pi 4B, optional eMMC, compact form factor

32-bit (aarch32):

  • Pi 2B: BCM2836 quad-core Cortex-A7 @ 900 MHz, 1 GB RAM, 100 Mbps Ethernet

Figure 6: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B.

All models include WiFi (dual-band on Pi 3B/4B) and Bluetooth. The Pi 4B and CM4 also support various carrier boards, including the CM4 IoT Router Board Mini and CM4 NVMe NAS enclosures.

Infix provides DHCP-enabled Ethernet out of the box, with WiFi available for client or access point modes. However, these boards have limitations for routing use cases: a single Ethernet port and CPU-based packet processing (no hardware switching offload).

Pi 2B revision 1.2, which admittedly is a bit of a unicorn, uses a BCM2837 and is not supported. The supported Pi 2B uses BCM2836.

For installation, download an SD card image from the latest bootloader builds and flash to a microSD card. Default credentials are admin/admin via SSH. See the 64-bit README or 32-bit README for details.

StarFive VisionFive2

One of the most exciting things to witness, over past decade or so, is the rise of RISC-V. StarFive decided to make a follow-up to the first, very popular VisionFive, with a bit more powerful CPU, quad-core U74 called JH7110, yet keeping with the values of the original. Not as cheap as the R2S, it still brings a lot of value.

The VisionFive2 is actually very similar to the RaspberryPi family, with the distinct difference of having two Ethernet ports, making it suitable for use as a home network router.

Figure 7: StarFive VisionFive2.

Infix supports only a subset of all the features of this board. As always, the focus is on networking, but PoE, eMMC support, and the M.2 slot stand out as candidates for exploration.

Qemu

Although not really a “board”, Qemu can be quite useful for anyone who just wants to understand what Infix is. All releases, as well as the latest (nightly) builds, have an x86_64 image that can be run on any Linux PC with Qemu installed (instructions).

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