[Cerowrt-devel] edgerouter Xes and lede

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 1:21 PM, Joel Wirāmu Pauling <joel at aenertia.net> wrote:
> 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.

I have been using the pcengines apu2 boards with good success prior to
now (with ubuntu). I plan to switch one to lede when I get a chance.

I don't recommend using them as a wifi AP, as you get better antennas
out of anything else. Internally I've mostly switched to well-located
ubnt uap-lites (running lede). They don't have any of the
make-wifi-fast fixes as yet, but ac can be dramatically better than n.
I also am mostly liking the tp-link AC2600 - a dual-core arm (on lede)
- again, no make-wifi-fast fixes, but....

I put the edgerouter x sfp in place today on my sonic fiber network.
I'm not sure where the bottlenecks are, but I never get more than
130Mbits down per host I test from (so I suspect they are doing some
interesting shaping there).

I also got some kernel errors when running cake with it with (sigh)
ethernet offloads enabled.

> 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
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
>
>



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