[Cerowrt-devel] edgerouter Xes and lede

[Dave Taht <dave.taht@gmail.com>]

For a long time now I've had several edgerouters in production using
their default (fq_codel-enabled) vyatta based OS. There are also
backports of cake available for it.

For 50-80 bucks, they are a *really nice quad core mips box* - capable
of forwarding at a gbit (and for that matter, can serve netperf at a
gbit)

But dealing with their 3.10 ancient kernel and foreign configuration
interface has always been a pain for me, so yesterday I reflashed my x
and x-sfp with lede's final 17.01 release, and:

they are *marvelous* as lede boxes. Oodles of flash. The quad core
works well. I'm mad at myself for not reflashing them long ago...

It's a PITA to reflash them - you have to open one up, put on a 3.3v
ttl serial converter, tell uboot to load a fresh kernel via tftp, then
copy a lede image over that and sysupgrade -n to rewrite the flash...

but after you do all that, you never have to do it again.

(I should probably write a howto)

I haven't gone so far as to try deploying one - I'm still benchmarking
- but as I've spent a lot of time trying to get little hackerboards to
push a gbit (only the odroid c2 can) - and for that matter, I can't
get the linksys ac1200 past 700Mbits - being able to do it on a box
that comes with a case, that runs lede well, that has a bunch of ports
on it - is a win.

One thing that wasn't apparent to me from the marketing and my own
usage, which presented 5 separate distinct ethX interfaces in the
vyatta OS, is that, on lede, it has only a single ethernet interface
onboard, and does it's magic for forwarding with vlan tagging (it may
well be there are actual separate ethernet chips on it or the original
binary firmware emulated those, but....)

I tested SQM to 200Mbits, that worked fine.

-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org