Sub 200€ router with mature support and good throughput on 1Gbps connection

GL-Inet has the router called Burma or some such, it's mvebu platform if I'm not mistaken, but without mwlwifi mess.

That is a 1 GHz dual a53 router. Not sure whether it will actually perform well at 1 Gbps. At least SQM is unlikely to reach that speed. Otherwise this looks like nice platform.

So outside of an x86 platform for wired-only, which one you'd recommend between Brume, rPi4 or NanoPi R4S for raw CPU (as in openssl) performance?

Since I have no first hand experience with either, I do not know. Just looking at the pure CPU performance without accelerators, the >= 1.5 GHz quad core A72 in the RP4B seems like having the most "oomp", but it is also the most incomplete as a router, since it only has a single ethernet port and hence will require at least an additional USB ethernet dongle.

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In all honesty RPi4 is a very poor choice since he's specifically asking about OpenSSL performance and the RPi4 lacks hardware crypto to begin with. USB also is less than ideal for reliability and performance. You might want to consider using a computing module and an IO board but in that case a board using Rockchip RK3399 is a much more suitable and cost effective solution.

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Good point, but I had read "as in openssl" not necessarily as the main application, which in retrospect is probably the wrong reading...

That is often brought up, yet quite a number of users seems to be sufficiently happy with the RPi4B+USB3-Ethernet dongle solution even for Gbps-links, but certainly the quality of USB3 ethernet dongles is a hit and miss thing. I note that the "NanoPi R4S" also has the second ethernet adapter connected via USB, albeit internally. (EDIT correction, as @mpa wrote, this is wrong, the nR4S does not suffer from USB ethernet ;)) About the Rockchip RK3399, I can offer no opinion since I never used one.

Sure that will give on e PCIe 2.0 1x slot, so will allow for a "real" ethernet NIC, but at a considerable price increase.

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The NanoPi R4S has one Native Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCIe Gigabit Ethernet interface:
https://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_R4S

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The biggest problem about the very attractive nanopi r4s mostly is that no one really knows what it can do so far. It's just to new to tell, and while the underlying core speed is one (promising) metric, the network interconnect is a different one (PCIe or SOC native doesn't really imply up to which throughput it can keep up), nor if the manufacturer messed up in regards to cooling, CPU scaling or board design. On paper this device looks very nice, but I've only seen a very sparse suggestion that it apparently can route 1 GBit/s today (no hints what that entails though, no rough CPU usage, no indication if PPPoE was in use and no words about SQM or VPN), much more feedback will be needed before it can be compared with the RPi4.

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Thanks, so I mixed up things here... it also has 2 A72 cores at up to 2GHz, so on paper should be similar to an RPi4B. With the caveat the @slh mentions, not much real-life data available how it performs.

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Can't say much about Linux and Nanopi (the majority of boards aren't upstreamed to mainline u-boot and that's a go no for me and the crab NIC doesn't help) but RockPro64 and Intel NIC(s) performs very well on FreeBSD 13 :slight_smile: I can probably get you some numbers if interested which should give you an idea.

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You mean Brume?!

Mine arrived. It works with wired. WiFi is bad though. Drops or does not connect. You need an external AP. Not sure if it’s a general problem or I am missing something.

Also uses OpenWRT from at least a year ago.

I thought Brume only had 2,4 GHz on board. One sure would/should not buy it for the wireless.

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@moeller0 @diizzy @slh @Borromini -- this thread turned into a great read thanks to you gentlemen. :wink:

RockPro64 does look intriguing, wish I knew about it when I placed an order at pine64 a little while back.

Do share more about your setup -- did you have to print your own case? Is there a multi-port NIC you can recommend?

I current don't have a good case for it however

I deployed several NanoPi R2S (RK3328) in December, each with Armbian and two OpenWRT virtual machines on top, and I don't have a single performance complain. With taking difference between RK3328 and RK3399 into account it's easy to guess that NanoPi R4S should be much faster (I use RK3399 on several other boards for one and half year - two additional Cortex-A72 makes a difference) although base config with metal case costs two times more.

You can find temperature and frequency tests here:
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=69&product_id=282
https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=284

Hey guys, thank you all for your replies! I think this is really sad. To be honest, when I got 1Gbps cable a couple of years ago, that was the reason for me to leave OpenWrt. Because my old WR1043ND v1 and WDR4300 (which I only used as a wired router) could not handle throughput.

Right now I am pretty close to your recommendations, I am using a wired Ubiquiti ER-X for Routing,Gateway,DHCP etc. and an Ubiquiti nanoHD as AP. Both with original Firmware not with OpenWrt.
I thought it would be nice to have another look around and check if there was an open source alternative but it seems there is not.
To be honest SBCs don't seem to be the solution. Some like NanoPi etc have shitty community support, lacking documentation, old kernels etc. Others like RPi have slow i/o, high power draw and saved money at the wrong end (like crypto extensions). All have in common that their NICs are not great and adding at least one NIC by USB doesn't seem a good option anyways. And what good is an open source firmware, when hardware is largely undocumented.

So it seems I will go x86 sometime in the future. To bad Intel has been holding out on new Atom CPUs for almost 4 years now. But with the upcoming Jasper Lake Atom CPUs (N6005, N5105), I might give x86 another shot if price/performance/powerdraw are as good as I hope. (I know that Intel CPUs are far from open source hardware too, but at least support and documentation should suffice to get a decent router running without problems)

Mikrotik RB3011 with experimental OpenWrt. Even has an SFP slot for your fiber. I'm now trying the NSS accelerated stuff as well. Looks real promising...

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You can run OpenWrt on the ERX.

Not sure what you are talking about here - you can use both of NanoPi R2S and R4S with Linux 5.10 (Armbian images). What information you can not find in vendor or Armbian documentation?

On NanoPi R4S second Ethernet port is wired via PCIe, it was mentioned before here. I wonder if you actually read the specs or at least this topic?

What exactly you been missing here and here? What part of this hardware is undocumented?

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