Hello, currently I'm running the official release of 21.02. Now I want to update to 22.03.
After several upgrades, would it be better to install and configure it completely new or is an update as good as well?
Furthermore I saw that community builds like the ones from @hnyman, @KONG or @ACwifidude are quite popular. After looking at the respective threads I still don't understand if the builds "only" included additional Software add-ons (that can be easily installed via luci by a newbie like me)? Or are there any more deeper technical tweaks and optimizations?
So what are the actual benefits of the community builds?
OpenWrt comes with a skinny set of packages that you can add on to. If you use very little, it works. However, every time you sysupgrade you have to reload all your packages.
Hynman and Kong both have builds with popular sets of packages to give you excellent functionality. Additionally they update their builds frequently keeping fresh with the best features.
My NSS build activates the two NSS CPUs and provides hardware offloading for maximum performance. It is ideally suited for 500mbps => gigabit ISP connections.
As another option. If you like a certain set of packages, building OpenWrt from scratch isn’t too hard if you have a linux computer. You can then automatically build your favorite set of packages and have exactly what your want.
If you trust the maintainers of the builds, then you are most likely better off with some of these builds.
The following applies to my build:
I run it myself on my main unit. Before I upload a build I flash it on my own unit and test basic functionality such as wan connection, wireless etc.
They do contain minor tweaks or workarounds for things that are broken in official builds. An example is current mac80211 in 21.02 and 22.03 comes with aql + airtime fairness patches which cause wifi to be unusable after 1 or 2 weeks. I dropped the patches and had uptimes of 60+ days without any issues.
They are most likely more beginner friendly, e.g. my build contains webif out of the box and includes common features. Official builds only contain the most basic features without a webif up front.
Some advanced user may prefer a minimalistic build though.
You can usually contact the people directly through the forum.
Hello, wow thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, even from builders themselves. I did a little research on the NSS build. Having a 1.000Mbit line, is it correct that I should prefer to give ACwifidude build a shot as the other builds might be the speed bottleneck?
It depends, if you have IPV6, then non NSS is okay. The R7800 CPU can't really handle NAT at 1Gbps especially once you enable qos. Not sure if acwifidude added my sqm package with nss support to his build, which allows to easily configure it via webif. But ACwifidude has different NSS builds, I just build for 22.03 right now.
Currently I'm using Kong's build and it works fine. I get about 850Mbit via LAN. So not the full 1Gbit. Don't know what the limiting factor is. In theory, are higher speed possible at all?
SQM is inactive, but on my todo list. However, even without bufferbloat looks ok.
Hello, maybe it's a stupid question. I'm trying to configure SQM. But obviously I cannot determine the maximum speed. So is the R7800 capable of handling Gbit speed via LAN? In that case the limiting component could be the Ethernet adapter, something else or maybe even the cable connection.
So if I'm not able to measure the speed, what's the recommendation for the SQM parameters?
Why?!
You should know what your ISP promises you.
You can test how much of that you actually receive, set your limits accordingly.
ipq8065 is good for routing (no sqm) up to ~500 MBit/s (maybe 650 MBit/s tops), with sqm/ cake that drops to roughly 190 MBit/s; things like PPPoE would drop these figures further. For fine-tuning, you will have to do your own measurements.
I know what the ISP promises me, 1000 Mbit.
But as I said, speedtest via waveform says 850Mbit. And I'm not sure, what causes the difference, e.g. ISP, R7800, laptop hardware, something else
The speedtest of the ISP also confirms the 850 at the end device, but also says 10xx at the modem. Theoretically I could use that to configure SQM, if I trust it. But does that make sense, if the R7800 is not able to handle 1000 Mbit?
Max for a 1 gig NIC is ~940mbps. Max I’ve seen for NSS fq_codel is ~900mbps. A couple mbps loss beyond that is reasonable depending on congestion on your local network and ISP. iperf will give the most accurate results and speedtest will give decent results (servers get busy sometimes of the day). I personally don’t use the SQM feature, I found my latency is already good with NSS by itself.
