Edge router HW

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi,
is it possible to say which device will be stable for an edge router scenario? I want to run openwrt on these.


vs

thanks

2

also i found https://www.pine64.org/rockpro64/

any view on these in terms of stability under openwrt / linux ... thanks

3

any idea here? but pine64 has only 1 eth so not good idea.

4

Subscribing! I am interested in the same!

5

RockPro64 works well under FreeBSD 13-CURRENT with an additional dual port Intel NIC however there are some things being worked on such as being able to use both CPU clusters simultaneously, RTC driver is missing to mention a few things. I would imagine that it works well under Linux 5.10 too with the latest release of u-boot but as for now I'm not aware of a distro offering this atm (its a question of time). I'm not sure how well it's supported using the current LTS kernel (5.4) however. The Brume is an interesting little device and Marvell have a good track record regarding support and stability in general however it's not very fast compared what's available but it is however a bit cheaper and comes with a neat case.

That being said, you can work around the issue with only one LAN port by using VLANs however that will also cut your theoretical bandwidth in half (it's a bit more than that but roughly) and will also complicate your setup.

6

@diizzy thanks, and what about apu4d4?

7

Very dated hardware, Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, I don't think I need to go on....

8

@diizzy thanks, so is there any better alternative or Brume is the way to go? thanks!

9

also wondering if there is a way to extend Brume with GSM module so I have 2 different network providers one via ethernet other via GSM (if ethernet provider fail to have a service link to a network).

10

I guess you could either use a USB modem or possibly more reliable a separate modem/gateway in bridge modem connected via ethernet. To be honest I don't really know what would be the best hardware today, IPQ4018 works quite well but there are issues with VLANs to my knowledge and there are reports of flakey USB support. IPQ8064 still suffers from ethernet issues etc. Marvell should be fine but it's getting old and is kinda slow but that might not be an issue in your usecase.

11

@diizzy i see, so what about these ubiquity edgerouters? like https://www.ui.com/edgemax/edgerouter-4/

12

They're not bad especially from a price/performance standpoint if you use vendor firmware but there's no noticable hardware acceleration available and support is kinda poor in OpenWrt. MIPS64 is although dead as a platform as Marvell have moved on to ARM so you probably wont see much more development on that hardware platform.

13

@diizzy i see, so is it possible what device is good to go these days?

14

Probably, I haven't personally touched any 64-bit Marvell ARM SoCs but they should be pretty reliable in general.

15

Why is that? I have one running here on master and AFAIK it's fully supported.

16

Except that "images" are a mess, it's on life support upstream, performance is well... not great by any means?