I like the idea of having OpenWrt on switches. The UI feels comfortable and I like open source (security and privacy).
I checked the ToH very carefully.
First, the different versions (v1, v2, ...) are very confusing.
The doc barely exists.
The older versions (which are supported by OpenWrt) are mostly not deliverable or extremely expensive.
PoE+ is mostly max ~78W in total (4x25,5=>100W would be great).
10GBe seems not very supported (1GBe could be a bottleneck nowadays. Something with 2.5GBe would be already great).
Is there any work in progress for switches which are a little more future proof?
total budget of 240 watts. Ports
1-4 support 60-watt 802.3bt PoE and ports 5-8 support 30-watt 802.3at
But yes, also many new devices with POE don't use the known-and-supported broadcom PSE chips, but currently-unsupported-by-realtek-poe chips. On those, POE is enabled, but no further management is possible.
Even if that gets sorted out, the whole OpenWrt management side of it seems unclear, since there is another competing(?) framework for POE developed for the only other non-Realtek POE-Switch supported by OpenWrt
Sadly, additionally to that, there seem to be some blockers for moving forward on some importants fronts, some of which you alluded to.
10GB support seems to exist in some boards based on RTL9XXX, but the whole realtek fam seems stuck on 5.15 at the moment. I'm not sure, if LACP/Bonding with HW offload currenty works on any supported device.
I think, 6.1 includes stuff, that will enable HW offloaded Bonding, but efforts to support seem stalled, because (aiui) people are considering skipping directly to 6.6.
The above is my current (maybe flawed/incomplete) understanding of the situation. Others can probably chime in with more info
Thanks for the answers so far! I hope some more join the conversation
Btw: POE+ is 30-watt (25.5 net) 802.3at.
More and more routers and AP's do support 2.5GBe since OpenWrt 23.05.
Having wall mounted AP's with 2.5 GBe requires usually around 18-20W, so the POE 802.3at 15.4W (13W net) seems not enough.
It looks like the direction also goes to 10 GBe with e.g. the Banana Pi BPI-R4 and WIFI7.
Personally I dont need the 10 GBe but at least a 2.5 GBe upstream port would be nice to solve the bottleneck.
Yeah, and we should add that this is definitely not OpenWrt's fault. The manufacturers will often change devices without any corresponding change in packaging, or even sometimes on the device label itself (I've seen devices with the same model number on the label that had different and incompatible revs of hardware inside the case). Very often you simply don't know what you have until it's in your hands, you boot it up and poke around.
(One of my APs is a V 1.0, which had gone out of production 2 years before I bought it and I thought I was getting a V 4.0, so this is a sore point with me.)
