Port of TL-WR1043N v5 to ath79?

For Developers
1

Hello,
I'm running a TL-WR1043N v5 as router on a 500 MBit/s line. The router is able to route ~200 mbit/s since the ar71xx platform does not support hardware nat. I have seen that most of the TL-WR1043N* devices are ported to the new ath79 target. Is there a chance that this devices gets ported too?

Best regards,
Michael.

2

It wont magically do 500mbit however....

3

I'm pretty sure it can. I did some tests before I set it up as router. When no other processes consumed CPU-power, it handled up to 450 MBit with LEDE and almost 1 GBit with the original TP-Link firmware.
Currently there are processes consuming CPU (WebUI+Link Monitoring+SSH+VPN consumes 20-50% CPU), so I have only ~200 MBit throughput, then the CPU becomes the bottleneck. With network offloading it should be possible to route 500 MBit while all the stuff running on the CPU.

4

You can install a master snapshot. It has the 4.14 kernel with flow offloading capabilities and check if the speed is OK.

I suspect the v4 ath79 may work on v5.

5

ath79 doesn't support hardware NAT either.

6

@Pilot6 Thank you for clarification. I assumed with 4.14 kernel (as in the new ath79 target) I always have hardware NAT. Is there a way to figure out on which devices HW nat is supported?

I'll try to obtain another TL-WR1043N v5 device, so that I can do some testing (unfortunately it seems to be discontinued or out of stock :-/ )

7

Software flow offloading is sufficient in most cases. It is supported on 4.14.
Hardware NAT is supported on Mediatek SoCs.

Your device should be close to 500MB/s with 4.14.

8

I see. So I just need to switch to snapshot (or wait for 19.01) and stay with ar71xx?

9

For now ar71xx is OK. I see no problem to port v5 to ath79, because the only difference from v4 that I see is absence of USB port.

10

Hi,
I get another of this devices, so I could do some tests (using iperf on an 1GBit LAN).
My setup: Server <-> LAN <-> WR1043N (doing NAT) <-> My PC

The device is fresh flashed, so almost no other stuff is consuming CPU.

Results:
Stable build with 4.9 Kernel: 460-480 MBit/s with 100% CPU Load

Snapshot build with 4.14.105 Kernel: 460-480 MBit/s with 100% CPU Load

Looks to me that there's absolutely no difference :frowning:

Is there anything I need to do to enable Software flow offloading?

Edit: Found the option to enable flow offloading :wink:

Results:
Snapshot build with 4.14.105 Kernel and flow offloading: ~900 MBit/s with 100% CPU Load (95% ksoftirqd, 4% kworker)

Edit2: Did the same test with "hardware offloading" enabled - same results. So it's obviously not implemented...