[josteink]

I’ll chime in too.

My experience with OpenWrt and hardware acceleration is that it matters once speeds gets high enough.

I’ve had some TP-Link Archer c7’s I’ve used as a main router in the past.

When all it has to do is switch packets on my local network there’s literally no load (as inspected by using htop). Gigabits ahoy.

However when routing stuff out to the internet, it needs not only to switch but also to do software NAT, and then the SoCs performance starts saturating between 350 and 380 mbps. Doing 500mbps is not happening.

For that reason I changed my main router to a Linksys WRT 1900 ACS (with a Marvel-based SOC) which has hardware NAT.

It runs symmetric 500mbps without seeing the gauges in htop even move. It’s a night and day difference.

Once speeds get high enough, HW offloading isn’t just nice to have, it’s a requirement.

And when you do have that, almost all those other tasks the router has to do becomes trivial because you have wads and wads of CPU to spare.

Imo PC-based solutions are overkill, but yes, you may end up with a more open solution that way.

[atomt]

I have no idea about the economics in this area, but it kind of baffles me that they add these propietary, closed source and buggy "accelerators" instead of improving the cores a bit. A bit more L1 cache would go a long way for networking.

Many switched from MIPS to ARM in the past 10? years, but the cores remain mostly just as anaemic as they were.

[workrockin]

>Imo PC-based solutions are overkill, but yes, you may end up with a more open solution that way.

Yes exactly! If you look at it from the point of view of functionality to price ratio a pc might just be the best router there is.

- Its modular

- Its easily repairable

- Its portable (in the form of mini pc or a laptop)

- You can buy a second hand PC

Finally if you're taking the trouble of installing openwrt on a router it is a reasonable assumption that you want to do more with it. And in that case you're severely limited by the hardware that you choose.

To get the best of both worlds we can have a dedicated PC as a main router. And other cheap routers as your network extenders.