OpenWrt on Proxmox: poor Wifi

[riodoro]

Hi,
I try to run OpenWrt on an Intel NUC under proxmox 8.2.2 as an AP.
Goal is to retire another OpenWrt-AP for energy-saving reasons.

The wifi-nic is PCI-"passthroughed" to the openwrt vm.
What I experience is an awfull Wifi performance (16 MBit/s speedtest.net).
IPerf to the proxmox-openwrt router gives more than 300 MBit/s.
So it is not a cabling issue.

This is the Wifi-nic of the NUC:

root@pve:~# lspci
...
01:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 8265 / 8275 (rev 78)

Here are the relavant entries from dmesg:

root@OpenWrt:~# dmesg | grep iw
[ 4.250896] iwlwifi 0000:00:10.0: loaded firmware version 36.ca7b901d.0 8265-36.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
[ 4.267486] iwlwifi 0000:00:10.0: Detected Intel(R) Dual Band Wireless AC 8265, REV=0x230
[ 4.328451] iwlwifi 0000:00:10.0: base HW address: f8:59:71:e8:e4:ff, OTP minor version: 0x0
[ 4.405819] ieee80211 phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'iwl-mvm-rs'

Another point is, that there is only one Radio in Luci, where I can select the two or five GHz band. Obviously the nic does not support both bands in parallel.

Anything missing?
Any ideas?

[psherman]

Intel WiFi cards are known to have poor support for AP mode operation.

Further, your potential performance is severely limited when using a pci wifi card inside an x86 system as compared to a regular “plastic” AP.

Energy savings may also not be realized as compared to a purpose built WiFi router device unless you are talking about a very low power x86 system.

There are also a number of reasons to avoid a virtualized router environment - bare metal is usually best.

See this long thread for an extensive discussion on the matter:

Best m2 wifi card for openwrt

Hello in short i have mini pc with opnsense bridged with virtual openwrt. I got Intel ax200 and im strugling to make it working. I success only 2.4 ghz barely. So im not trying to find analouge to that but if i want to spend some money i want to find best one. Dual/tri band with good quality and signal spreading range. Tnx all cheers

[riodoro]

Thanks for your reply.
I think, you're right.

@psherman

Energy savings may also not be realized as compared to a purpose built WiFi router device unless you are talking about a very low power x86 system.

As the NUC runs 24/7 (there are a couple other vms on it), I thought it was worth a try to save roundabout 5W baseload.
The NUC idles with 7W, when OpenWrt is started, it goes up to 8,5 W.
But when the performance is unusable, its useless.

Btw:
I was running opnsense for a couple of years as a proxmox vm without any issues. I switched it off to reduce the complexity in my home network a little bit
(Just in opposite of running an AP in proxmox)

[brada4]

Not sure about proxmox but in place of passthrough you can spin up radio device from host then bridge to routing guest.
ymmv i did that only for client.

[riodoro]

Nice idea.
Perhaps I can build the AP directly on proxmox (debian). Then the OpenWrt vm would be obsolet.

[brada4]

Better wifi card highly recommended, no matter software choices. AP dual band m2 card will be more expensive than basic plastic box AP.

[riodoro]

I'll give it a try tomorrow.
If it doesn't work satisfiyingly, i'll stick with the RT3200-AP (best router I ever had )

[silentcreek]

@psherman

Further, your potential performance is severely limited when using a pci wifi card inside an x86 system as compared to a regular “plastic” AP.

How so? I've been using Qualcomm Atheros based miniPCIe modules in an PCEngines APU2 for years and the performance is actually slightly better than my trusted TP-Link Archer C7 v2 (which, ironically, uses a miniPCIe module for its 5GHz radio).

So, I agree on the "avoid Intel" part of the answer, but not PCIe modules per se. That being said, I haven't had the chance to try wifi 6 modules.

[psherman]

@silentcreek

That being said, I haven't had the chance to try wifi 6 modules.

These are generally what I’m referring to as potentially problematic, lower performance, and expensive relative to plastic box devices. Combined with the fact that a plastic box ap has an array of antennas that have been designed, optimized and calibrated for best performances.