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

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

Posted Jul 31, 2014 21:20 UTC (Thu) by rknight (subscriber, #26792)
In reply to: What about hardware? (was: The EFF launches a router project) by mtaht
Parent article: The EFF launches a router project

>>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.

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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.