Mini PC update with Intel N100

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi, I wanted to upgrade my mini PC ( Intel(R) N100 X86/64) current version OpenWrt 23.05.3 r23809-234f1a2efa / LuCI openwrt-23.05 branch git-24.073.29889-cd7e519 I think I used ext4. I'd like to upgrade it using Luci attended sysupgrade. Is this possible? Will my configuration remain the same? What are the partitions? Which version do you recommend? I'm upgrading because my current version doesn't handle the CPU cores well with packet steering. I use QosMate with hybrid with 2.5 GB/s download speed. Thank you all, I look forward to your kind reply.

2

Please post </> enclosed output from ubus call system board

squashfs

Never will, use irqbalance for intel netcards instead.

Are you sure? 25Gbps optical network card?

3

have you re-partitioned your drive, or is everything (disk layout) default ?

4

Almost certainly its 2.5Gbps Ethernet. These are commonly built into mini N100 devices.

Often autocorrect will take Gb (gigabit) and turn it into GB (gigabyte)

5 
 "kernel": "5.15.150",
        "hostname": "OpenWrt",
        "system": "Intel(R) N100",
        "model": "Default string Default string",
        "board_name": "default-string-default-string",
        "rootfs_type": "ext4",
        "release": {
                "distribution": "OpenWrt",
                "version": "23.05.3",
                "revision": "r23809-234f1a2efa",
                "target": "x86/64",
                "description": "OpenWrt 23.05.3 r23809-234f1a2efa"

I think I have that one, how can I check?
My question was whether to use snapshots or the latest version 24.10.4

yes, 2500 Mb/s

6

I have success running OpenWrt in an LXC container hosted on linux. Upgrade between version is done manually and it’s not bad just need to copy several config files over.

1 Like
7

I can't use this one it seems much more comfortable (Luci attended sysupgrade)

8

Even irbalance doesn't work because only 1 core out of 4 is used. This is the problem. All cores remain at a maximum of 20%, while the first core is at 90% during the bufferbloat test.

9

then I did it like this

10

it doesn't answer the question though.

post the output of your mount and df -kh commands.

11 
/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,noatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,noatime)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,noatime)
cgroup2 on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate)
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime)
/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot type vfat (rw,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot type vfat (rw,noatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,noexec,noatime,size=512k,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,noatime,mode=600,ptmxmode=000)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,noatime)
bpffs on /sys/fs/bpf type bpf (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,noatime,mode=700)

Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root               102.3M     48.1M     52.2M  48% /
tmpfs                     3.8G    152.0K      3.8G   0% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p1           16.0M      6.1M      9.8M  38% /boot
/dev/nvme0n1p1           16.0M      6.1M      9.8M  38% /boot
tmpfs                   512.0K         0    512.0K   0% /dev
12

Cake is a single-threaded process, it needs to see all the packets and can't have stuff going through multiple queues etc. Though it should be able to use one thread for each cake queue I think (so if you have upload and download simultaneous it should split to 2 cpus)

13

You do mot have much data though?
This is ex4 = quite hard to do major upgrades?

14

You're on ext4. There's not a simple upgrade path. it's more like take a backup of configs, and write a new image to your disk, then upload configs. In the process you will lose internet until the new image is up and running. Another alternative is to go virtual:

There are some advantages and disadvantages to virtualizing the router. One of them would be to make upgrades easier. Another would be to utilize your hardware for more than one thing. Disadvantages include some issues with security such as packets being visible to the host, and potential downsides with performance or ease of goofing up routing etc.

If you decide overall virtualization is for you, here's how you could do it:

To begin with you'll still have internet so do this:

  1. Download the proxmox installer image, burn it to a USB stick.
  2. Download a current openwrt ext4 disk image
  3. Download your config from your existing ext4 install
  4. Hook up monitor and keyboard to N100 box

You lose internet at this point. Have help sites open in your browser tabs, and/or use a phone for internet info lookup

  1. Install proxmox on N100 box using USB stick
  2. Create an OpenWrt VM in proxmox using ext4 as disk image
  3. attach appropriate network interfaces to OpenWrt VM (basically create virtual ethernets and hook them up to bridges on the host)

Here you'll have internet again at some point during this process:

  1. Boot the VM
  2. Upload the config files backed up from your old OpenWrt
  3. Adjust configs as needed for new virtual machine

Voila, you have a virtualized router.

Once you've done all this, after a while you may need to upgrade again, to upgrade your OpenWrt, you create a new VM with an updated ext4 image. You download a config backup from the old image. You shut down the old image and boot the new image. Then you upload configs... You should be up and running again. If not. Shut down new image and fall back to booting old image...

This virtual ability to fall-back to older image is one of the major advantages of virtualization. Also, you don't need as much in the way of support for specialized hardware, the proxmox kernel will actually handle special NIC drivers and other hardware driver issues.

Also you get a virtual console via Proxmox so you don't have to have a keyboard and monitor on your box but can still debug some issues via connecting virtually.

Once it's set up I think the security is acceptable. But double-checking you've got virtual ethernet devices hooked to proper linux bridges on the host, and don't put ANY ip addresses associated with the WAN or other NON-LAN bridges on the host, and you'll be ok. On the LAN (or management VLAN) you'll need an ipv4 and/or ipv6 on the bridge so you can talk to the host.

1 Like
15

That's the default partition size. Either LuCI Attended Sysupgrade from the gui or owut auc (oops, my bad, 23.05...) from CLI will upgrade an ext4 device painlessly.

16

By now it should be increased to at least 256 MB.