I saw a debian bug report Installation was successfully at BananaPi. When initially looking at the Banana Pi, as it has a version with a number of network interfaces, I didn't readily see the tooling necessary for booting images.
The bug report shows that Debian now has native images available, and similar images can be found in the Buster and Sid distributions. There are also Beagle Bone Black images in there.
Random links I picked up for building custom installs:
- Building a pure Debian armhf rootfs - good writeup by Tim Fletcher
- DebianInstallerArmOtherPlatforms - Howto install Debian/armel with a custom kernel - links on the page lead to other excellent articles
- debian debootstrap - from one of the primary contributors to Banana Pi builds
- Banana Pi BPI-R2 Wiki - much updated since I last landed on it
- Searching testing people for hdmi + wifi in Kernel 4.16 - forum entry
- How to build an Ubuntu/Debian SD image from scratch - with some bonding notes
- Banana Pi BPI-R64 - wonder when the release date is
Kind of related, Redhat has a summary article of Introduction to Linux interfaces for virtual networking. Excellent summary of many interface types in Linux.
2019/02/18 From a different direction, via the Debian Bugs list, I've come across Lamobo R1 which is another name for the Banana Pi R1. The page has some additional information, and by cruising to the main page, additional AllWinner SoC info can be obtained.
In addition, Armbian Build on GitHub offers the code for building Arm kernels on these types of boards.
Kernel CI shows results of Kernel Builds on various devices, with an example entry of Kernel 5.0 booting on Banana Pi R2