Time for the last post of 2025, as the year is almost over. I’ll look back at key developments and notable products launched in 2025, share some CNX Software website traffic statistics, and look ahead to 2026. Year 2025 in Review After 22 product releases in 2024, Raspberry Pi calmed down a little bit in 2025, and the highlights of the year included the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard, the 5-inch variant of the Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2, and a Raspberry Pi 5 1GB RAM. What didn’t quite stop were the accessories from third parties for Raspberry Pi SBC and Raspberry Pi Pico boards. The most exciting Arm SoC release of 2025 was probably the 12-core CIX P1 Armv9 SoC found in Radxa Orion O6 SBC, MINISFORUM MS-R1 Arm mini PC, and Orange Pi 6 Plus board, but while performance was fine, it was overhyped in 2024, and software […]
Linux 6.18 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.18 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), which will likely become the next LTS kernel [update: it’s now official]: So I’ll have to admit that I’d have been happier with slightly less bugfixing noise in this last week of the release, but while there’s a few more fixes than I would hope for, there was nothing that made me feel like this needs more time to cook. So 6.18 is tagged and pushed out. Most of the last-minute fixes are minor fixes to drivers, with some random noise elsewhere (bluetooth, ceph, afs..). Nothing strikes me as standing out, but hey, there’s a shortlog appended if you want to see the details. And this obviously means that the merge window will open tomorrow, and I already have three dozen pull requests pending. Thanks. And as I already mentioned a couple of […]
Giveaway Week 2025 winners announced!
CNX Software’s Giveaway Week 2025 has just ended and we’ve now ready to announce the winners. We offered some of the review samples we tested, and three companies joined us offering new samples, namely Banana Pi with two router boards, VOIPAC with an industrial development kit, and RAKwireless offered two of their IoT development kits for the fifth year running. Besides the aforementioned prize, we also included an ESP32-P4 development kit, a dry switch from SONOFF, a Raspberry Pi CM4-based HMI with a 915MHz LoRa module, a 5-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display, and two USB PD voltage indicators on both CNX Software “International” and CNX Software Thailand. You can see all prizes shown below. Without further ado, here are the seven winners of Giveaway Week 2025 on CNX Software (English): M5Stack M5Tab – Ed Elecrow Pi Terminal – Tom Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite router board – Stef 5-inch Raspberry Pi […]
Giveaway Week 2025 – Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite
The third prize of CNX Software Giveaway Week 2025 is the Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite router board, which will be shipped directly to a randomly selected winner by the company. It’s powered by a MediaTek Filogic 850 (MT7987AV) quad-core Cortex-A53 network processor, coupled with 2GB DDR4 and 8GB eMMC flash, and equipped with four gigabit Ethernet ports, a 2.5GbE RJ45 WAN port, and a 2.5GbE SFP cage. It can also be extended with WiFi 7 and 5G cellular modules thanks to two mini PCIe sockets and an M.2 Key-B slot with USB 3.0 interface. The board also features a 16-pin MikroBus GPIO header with UART, I2C, SPI, PWM, and other signals to connect one of the over 1000 Mikroe Click modules available. As its name implies, the BPI-R4 Lite is a cost-down version of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 introduced a few years ago. The documentation has improved since the last […]
$165 Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro board offers 2x 10GbE SFP+ cages, 7x 10GbE/2.5GbE/GbE RJ45 ports, WiFi 7 support
The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro is a new router board based on MediaTek Filogic 880 (MT7988A) Cortex-A73 SoC offering two 10GbE SFP+ cages/RJ45 ports combos, four 2.5GbE RJ45 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, and optional WiFi 7 support via the Banana Pi BPI-R4-MIC-BE14 dual mini PCIe module. As its name implies, it’s a Pro/upgraded version of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 board first introduced in 2023, which doubles the memory to 8GB DDR4, doubles the SPI flash’s capacity to 256MB, and adds a few networking ports, M.2 expansion slots for a total of six, and a few other minor features highlighted in bold in the specifications below. Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Corex-A73 processor @ 1.8GHz with AI-powered packet accelerator called TOPS (Tunnel Offload Processor System) System Memory – 8GB DDR4 Storage 8GB eMMC flash 256MB SPI NAND Flash MicroSD card slot 2x […]
Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite – A mid-range MediaTek Filogic 850 2.5GbE router board with WiFi 7 and 5G support
Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite is a mid-range 2.5GbE router board based on MediaTek Filogic 850 (MT7987AV) quad-core Cortex-A53 network processor, coupled with 2GB DDR4 and 8GB eMMC flash, and equipped with four gigabit Ethernet ports, a 2.5GbE RJ45 WAN port, and a 2.5GbE SFP cage. It’s a cost-down version of the Banana Pi BPI-R4 router board powered by a Filogic 880 quad-core Cortex-A73 SoC with 10GbE support. It still supports WiFi 7 through the BPI-R4-NIC-BE14 dual mini PCIe WiFi 7 module and 4G LTE and 5G connectivity through an M.2 Key-B socket and three NanoSIM card slots. Banana Pi BPI-R4 Lite specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7987AV (Filogic 850) quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ 2.0 GHz with Network Processing Unit (NPU) capable of up to 7.5Gbps packet processing System Memory – 2GB DDR4 (SoC supports up to 4GB) Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, microSD card Networking 2.5GbE WAN port 2.5GbE SFP […]
Linux 6.15 Release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.15: So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now. Apart from that final scramble, things looked pretty normal last week. Various random small fixes all over, with drivers as usual accounting for most of it. But we’ve got some bcachefs fixes, some core networking, and some mm fixes in there too. Nothing looks particularly scary. And this obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow as usual, and I see the usual people being proactive and having sent me their pull requests. It’s memorial day tomorrow here in the US, but like the USPS, “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” – nor memorial day – stops the merge window. [ Actually, thinking back […]
Linux 6.14 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architecture
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.14 on LKML: So it’s early Monday morning (well – early for me, I’m not really a morning person), and I’d love to have some good excuse for why I didn’t do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. I’d like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed things. But no. It’s just pure incompetence. Because absolutely nothing last-minute happened yesterday, and I was just clearing up some unrelated things in order to be ready for the merge window. And in the process just entirely forgot to actually ever cut the release. D’oh. So yes, a little delayed for no good reason at all, and obviously that means that the merge window has opened. No rest for the wicked (or the incompetent). Below is the shortlog for the last week. It’s nice and […]



