What I'm trying to say is that it's lacking in areas you'd want to prioritize for a network device. The RPi-series are good for many applications but network isn't one where it excels.
It has onboard GigaLAN and you can get a USB3.0 GigaLAN adapter for <$20 US. That setup will suport VLAN tagging if needed. Connect it to a managed switch and you're golden. What more do you want?
Mainline.... kernel? I don't know what BPI products you're speaking of, but their router boards (which is what we're concerned about here) are for the most part very well supported in mainline. The R2 has mainline support predating kernel 5.4. The R64 has support predating 5.10. The R3 is brand spanking new, and it already has support going into mainline 6.3. Which is pretty damned good. I expect once 6.3 is out that this will be backported to the older maintained mainline kernels.
Incidentally, many, MANY routers never have any better mainline kernel support than their SoC, so BPI is actually very good.
The BPI-R2, six years old now, had a WiFi 4 chipset in its SoC that never really made it to primetime, but the device has a very good mPCIe slot that sources enough power for the modern 7915/7916 cards out today. The BPI-R2PRO was an unfortunate exception to BPI choosing goot Linux chipsets, an exception they corrected with the stellar R3. Other than the above, BPI's router boards have excellent Linux support in general, and dedicated OpenWrt maintainers.
@darksky
I guess "golden" isn't defined but I'm going to say that basic functionality such as hardware crypto and a PCIe connected NIC (or non USB based solution) are bare minimum requirements .I'm well aware that Wireguard specifically does not utilize hardware crypto it but you have a lot of software that does etc that's very much network oriented and you'll likely to utilize.
@VA1DER
Fair, there are DTS files in there but the rest is not that great (read working?). There appears to be various issues due to lack of software support and there are also a bunch of tickets open regarding these boards for OpenWrt (I'm also quite sure there were more that got lost in various transitions). There are a few very dedicated individuals hacking on these boards however and seems to get things upstreamed.There's no mainline uboot support at all from what I can tell which seems to cause issues with various initializations of devices etc lookingat other forums. I never stated that off the shelves routers were better I did however mention that milage might be better with other hardware. If they work for you that's great and I'm not sure who you are referring to by "dedicated OpenWrt maintainers"?
Get a dell wyse 5070 (or similar) + network card, for about $200
We had this discussion multiple times in the past already and opinions differ to some degree, but clearly the lack of (at least) a second ethernet port is going against the rPi4B as a router as are limited availability and increased price, by now you get alternative SoCs with similarly capable CPUs that offer >= 2 ethernet ports for less money and that are not harder to source than rPi4Bs.
Personally I consider the hardware crypto argument irrelevant as for my use cases it does not matter, but depending on specific use cases I accept that can be an issue as well. I would however not reject the rPi4B as contender for that reason in the abstract unless I already had a documented need for such crypto functions, just saying...
One PCIe slot is available for daughter boards for the rPi4B compute modules, but at that point price and availability of compute modules are going to be issues. Also that is a 1xPCIe slot that will support a single Gbps card, maybe a dual port one but that is the limit.
Yes and no. I own and operate a turris omnia, and use OpenWrt21 based TOS6 as OS (I bought it due to the promise of automatic updates from a source I happen to trust) and I am quite happy with it and the support from turris.
However team turris (while having members active here in the forum and participating in OpenWrt development) is already busy supporting their OpenWrt derived OS, so if you install OpenWrt proper the support is not going to come from team turris (they are doing a decent job for TOS but are already stretched thin as is supporting that).
Also, omnia's are somewhat pricy (IMHO worth it, but still that is a pile of EUR). And I do not believe that an omnia can wireguard at 800/800 Mbps, but I have never tried that myself.
I just bought two Beelink U59 Pro Business Mini PC, Intel 4 Cores N5105 Processor, Wi-11 Pro 16GB DDR4 512G SSD for 184.79 euros (each, from amazon.fr flash sale -36% and 50 euros coupon). I hope I'll be able to run WireGuard and SQM Cake near Gigabit speed.I should receive them in a few hours.
Yes, in fact, I had a much cheaper mini PC, also from Minisforum, model GK41, which has dual 1G LAN and it works well with OpenWrt (just the WiFi is bad, you can disable it)
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Update.
Although the R3 I purchased arrived without issue, I did experience some minor headaches (as to be expected).
Unfortunately, I've hit a roadblock. My primary motivation for purchasing the R3 was its power, which could potentially handle VPN encryption and other tasks. However, because I have to use a snapshot of OpenWrt, the kernel doesn't match for the WireGuard packages. I'll have to wait, but it's no big deal; I'll still be using it, so far so good.
Nah.
Install the WG packages immediately after installing the Openwrt image, or use the online image builder to incorporate the WG packages directly into the sysupgrade image.
Can I just place the WG packages into the Installed packages on this website and update via luci using the sysupgrade, and it should work? or would I need to flash my SD card again?
It should work, unless you've resized the root file system, then it might shrink back.
Hm, I couldn't expand it, but I did generate a new image with make image PROFILE="bananapi_bpi-r3" ROOTFS_PARTSIZE="50000" using the image builder, I think this should persist the sysupgrade, right?
Edit: I just winged it and flashed sysupgrade, it did keep the partition size, but I did lose all the packages I installed (WG stuff did come through), but I think I did something wrong, no biggie, it wasn't that much stuff.