What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project) [LWN.net]

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Jul 29, 2014 19:54 UTC (Tue) by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
Parent article: The EFF launches a router project

Is there a plan to complement this software project with some hardware building project, presumably funded on Indiegogo or Kickstarter? I really look forward to buying a router that has community support down to the last piece of physical wire on the board.

It is only too common to see free software projects like this target (workable, somewhat old) hardware, which unfortunately is more or less abandonware. I understand the need to access hardware that has open specifications, or failing that, is old enough to have been reverse engineered. But I can't help but think that all that effort spent to reverse engineer, replace binary blobs, and work around undocumented hardware bugs, might have been better spent getting it right from the beginning rather than fixing what is broken and old.

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What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Jul 29, 2014 20:50 UTC (Tue) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (5 responses)

The basic mips-based atheros chipset this stuff runs on has been continually updated (4 revisions over the last 6 years) and is in 100s of products currently sold. While I have CeroWrt running on several of these newer platforms, none have been compelling enough to switch to using, although several buffalo and TP-link products come close. I agree with another poster here that it looks like switching to arm is sanest as none of the mips boxes I've tried can drive 802.11ac fast enough.

OpenWrt itself runs on a lot of more current platforms than the wndr3800! - Go ahead, use those! but as CeroWrt has a rather large installed base of wndr3800s I have mostly been trying to make everything stable on that... and once that is stable... getting some of the science done on evaluating new queuing mechanisms... papers written, data sets sorted through, etc, etc.

and then porting over to a newer platform in the fall and starting new work (make-wifi-fast) on x86.

I agree that now that everything else is looking good (in openwrt and cero, anyway), that the stack is basically solid - that it would be best to try to do some sort of open source hardware for the next generation, in collaboration with the many other research oriented projects out there like project bismark, homenet, homewrt, openwireless, commotion wireless, dozens, nay hundreds of others, but it seems difficult even then - even if we could all co-operate on a RFP and buy to get to a large enough and cost-effective enough volume to be worth doing more engineering up front.

... and that requires effort and money up front that we do not have, and while we could perhaps raise enough via kickstarter it has been hard enough to express the advantages of a bufferbloat-free, blob-free, highly secure and flexible router during the project, much less beforehand. Despite the successes of projects like the rasberry pi and parallella, there would need to be some feasible long term gain and penetration into markets that linksys, buffalo, tp-link currently dominate, on razor thin margins...

Generally people only care about their home routers when they don't work. I have certainly watched smaller router-oriented ideas go by on kickstarter with something like jealousy...

I am extremely happy with where openwrt barrier breaker stands today, and I hope that the bigger manufacturers and ISPs decide to switch to it or something derived from it, on their next generations of hardware. Nothing does ipv6 as well as openwrt now does in particular, and beating bufferbloat so thoroughly has been quite satisfying.

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Jul 30, 2014 7:16 UTC (Wed) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link]

Thanks for sharing your insights into the state of router hardware today.

I hope that a future open hardware project can show the current manufacturers (linksys, etc) that it is advantageous to make router hardware that is open, and that it sells well because the consumers knows there is a community that will support it with security updates long after the router has been sold.

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Jul 31, 2014 21:20 UTC (Thu) by rknight (subscriber, #26792) [Link] (3 responses)

>>I agree with another poster here that it looks like switching to arm is >>sanest as none of the mips boxes I've tried can drive 802.11ac fast >>enough.

Have you tried any of the routers based on the Cavium Octeon chipset? I realize these are all currently commercial class routers, but I suspect that the multi-core Octeon chips would have no problem handling 802.11ac.

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Aug 1, 2014 4:09 UTC (Fri) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (2 responses)

The ubiquiti (ubnt) edgerouter series of octeon based routers added fq_codel support to their QoS system as of version 1.5 of their debian/vyatta based firmware, which is based on linux 3.4.

The HUGE thread this generated is behind the beta tester forum (you have to register on the site), but it was quite edifying and informative. http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX-Beta/Testing-fq-code...

We ran into some issues with ingress shaping that I hope will be resolved when they switch to linux 3.10 (which may be in 1.6 but I don't know). Overall the edgerouter lite was turning in QoS numbers about 2x better than what cerowrt on the wndr3800 can do (with less cpu), and the pro, 7x. Adding BQL looks useful on the octeon ethernet drivers as well but some rework down there seems needed; I keep hoping someone else will get around to it.

Openwrt recently has gained the ability to boot via tftp on the edgerouter series, and I just saw that support for the flash and usb had been added to the main openwrt tree for it, a few days back, so openwrt barrier breaker 3.10 on octeon may be getting closer to being useful for ordinary mortals.

I have been trying to find a router that could do ingress shaping at 250mbit for quite some time now, and maybe that box can do it eventually, with a lot more work through the stack.

I LOVE the edgerouter pro (8 ports) - getting that routing the yurtlab really simplified and sped up my configuration there (as without qos enabled, it can generally forward at 8gbits)

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Aug 1, 2014 4:17 UTC (Fri) by mtaht (guest, #11087) [Link] (1 responses)

In more direct answer to your question - no, haven't tried the octeon against 802.11ac. No pcie bus on the devices I've seen...

What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project)

Posted Aug 1, 2014 4:54 UTC (Fri) by rknight (subscriber, #26792) [Link]

Is it possible to do 802.11ac on miniPCI? And if so are there currently any cards available? I have a couple of Netgear ProSafe routers that apparently have Cavium Octeon processors that I've been meaning to attempt OpenWRT on.