[Namidairo]

The problem with than plan however, is that many of these devices tend to depend on arcane network hardware acceleration features in order to reach decent switching throughput.

Which rules out OpenWrt on some of the lower-spec pieces if you have a faster WAN connection (Ie. 1gbit), as I don't believe they have support for these on many platforms. (MT7621 is referenced as supported, and Qualcomm's "SFE" being supported in community builds)

[philjohn]

Qualcomm SFE has been replaced in OpenWRT with the more generic "flow offload", on an R7800 you can get gigabit speeds lan to wan.

Wireless is still lagging as the IPQ8064 has two NSS packet processing cores which, amongst other things, also accelerate crypto, including WPA.

I've got an R7800 running router duties on OpenWRT and then a Netgear Orbi RBK50 set running in AP mode which works well for my needs.

There IS a community effort to port the NSS acceleration (which accelerates qdisc and therefore traffic shaping with SQM) from the QSDK sources, but it's slow going.

[JeremyNT]

You have to be careful when purchasing a device intended for use with OpenWRT. Not all low end devices are appropriate (specifically Broadcom based devices, which require proprietary software only available from the vendor or somebody signing their NDA like DD-WRT).

The IPQ40xx devices tend to be well supported, though. Be sure to refer to the hardware list to see if a device is really supported before buying it.

https://openwrt.org/toh/views/toh_available_16128

[g-b-r]

> Which rules out OpenWrt on some of the lower-spec pieces

it's ruled out in any case as of now, because the current releases require (or at least strongly recommend) 64 MB of RAM, which surprisingly in 2020 is a problem in the networking world (for the cheapest -under 70$- devices)

[rubatuga]

Openwrt on Mt7621 is phasing out hardware accelerated NAT