NanoPi R6S Questions

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

This looks to be the perfect router for me! Questions!

I wanted to use SQM CAKE at gigabit speeds?

I want to use USB WIFI 6E USB Adapter to make this an all in one device, can I do this?

There's no official OpenWRT support for this device yet. Should this concern me for just very basic router and shaping?

2

I would guess the 4 arm a76 cores at (up to) 2.4 GHz should allow that (but since I have seen not tests yet, it might as well not work that great).

Not sure, friendlyelec seem to offer 4 USB devices that allow AP mode, not sure though if any of those actually uses WiFi6E. Not sure how well USB dongles work as AP radios, dince I lack first hand experience).

That depends... if you trust friendlyelec to update the firmware often/long enough and its functionality suits you lack of proper OpenWrt support does not need to be a showstopper (however in that case discussing the device here might not be ideal either :wink: ).

But, maybe you should consider splitting your WiFi router into a wire-only router (could be the R6S) and an wifi6E AP (which then can be positioned optimally for wifi coverage without concerns where your internet wires enter your house/apartment)

3

Good points! Often forget I can just use an AP. The USB ones are just so much cheaper

So is SQM Cake available with the factory image? I don't see any reason to not just buy this right now, looks perfect

4

I have no idea, since I never used friedlyelec's distruibution... I would assume that they offer their own repository which should contain the required packages and kernel modules, but that is pure speculation on my part. Hopefully someone with first-hand experience can give a more useful answer...

5

I have 2 cheap USB dongles from FriendlyElec, and I would say.....just avoid them....

First of all there is no driver compatible with OpenWrt, you have to use FriendlyWrt because they compiled a specific driver in, even on my Linux desktop I've spent lots of efforts to enable me to use them, one of them doesn't even work under Windows....

2 Likes
6

Most of the USB WiFi dongles are not quite Linux friendly, especially those Realtek one, almost all dongles on market (cheap enough one) are Realtek.

7

You can checkout this test, the performance is promising on R6S.

8

Good to know, avoid the USB adapters. I'm still in an apartment, hoping to buy a house soon, this will be on my short list when that time comes hopefully this year when I'm on my own Internet connection

9

I'd say avoid cheap USB dongles altogether regardless of who makes them.

10

I have 6.1 booting on the R6S

[    0.000000] Booting Linux on physical CPU 0x0000000000 [0x412fd050]
[    0.000000] Linux version 6.1.0 (shane@wasp) (aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc (GCC) 12.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.39) #19 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu Mar 16 09:47:26 GMT 2023
[    0.000000] Machine model: FriendlyElec Nanopi6 - RK3588
[    0.000000] efi: UEFI not found.
[    0.000000] Zone ranges:
[    0.000000]   DMA      [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x00000000ffffffff]
[    0.000000]   DMA32    empty
[    0.000000]   Normal   [mem 0x0000000100000000-0x00000001ffffffff]
[    0.000000] Movable zone start for each node
[    0.000000] Early memory node ranges
[    0.000000]   node   0: [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x00000000083fffff]
[    0.000000]   node   0: [mem 0x0000000009400000-0x00000000efffffff]
[    0.000000]   node   0: [mem 0x0000000100000000-0x00000001ffffffff]
[    0.000000] Initmem setup node 0 [mem 0x0000000000200000-0x00000001ffffffff]
[    0.000000] On node 0, zone DMA: 512 pages in unavailable ranges
[    0.000000] On node 0, zone DMA: 4096 pages in unavailable ranges
[    0.000000] cma: Reserved 16 MiB at 0x00000000ef000000
[    0.000000] psci: probing for conduit method from DT.
[    0.000000] psci: PSCIv1.1 detected in firmware.
[    0.000000] psci: Using standard PSCI v0.2 function IDs
[    0.000000] psci: Trusted OS migration not required

More info : NanoPi R6S kernel 6.1 Intergration

11

What does this mean big picture wise? (Very new to Linux and OpenWRT)

12

I had to apply some minor tweaks to get it to shape a gigabit with cake. My ISP uses a VLAN and PPPoE and I had it plugged in to the gigabit port on the R6S.
The default net-smp-affinity script of FriendlyWRT sets this port to use the slower cores, which can only manage about 600-700Mbit with cake. So I edited the smp-affinity script to allow the 3 ethernet ports to use the 4 fast cores which did the trick.