[Cerowrt-devel] edgerouter Xes and lede

[Joel Wirāmu Pauling]

I've just bought a couple of n3160 Braswell boards as was getting sick of
poor performance out of the MIP's stuff I have.

If you don't care about the AES-NI instruction set's you can pickup j1900
based 4 port routers off aliexpress for under $100 (with intel 200 series
NIC's no less).

The n3160's you can get for around 100$ but the cheap one's only have 2
gbit ports (rtl's).

The n3160's are only 6w at maximum draw and so far I've had much better
results out of them than any of the MIP's or ARM stuff i've been using for
the last few years.

The UBN stuff has been recommended in the past but when you can shift the
l3 forwarding to a much more featureful and standard x86_64 platform and
just hang your Wireless as dumb switches off of that I can't really think
why bothering with the esoteric stuff requiring ttl converters to get up
and running is going to warrant more investment at this point.

No one has yet to produce a proper x86  AC router - you can kludge one
yourself with compex cards... I for one would totally buy one if such a
thing were available.

On 10 March 2017 at 05:45, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
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> Cerowrt-devel at lists.bufferbloat.net
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>
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