@ACwifidude or anyone that can help. Would you be able to provide an updated 24.10.1 build for an EA7500V1 that includes NSS and ath10k drivers? It seems to have been a while since you created a new batch of the NSS versions.
Thank you!
32bit nss is discontinued long ago, your best option is firewall soft offload and swapping between -ct and non-ct ath10k firmwares+driver.
Well that is sad. The 23.05 runs really well on the EA7500V1. My main priority was WAN/NAT hardware offloading. The ath10k drivers do not help with that, correct?
Qualcomm hardware offload was never Open-sourced.
Top-end 32bit cpu your router has can do a lot without hardware help (unlike older ath79 generation)
Driver is not cause of regressions, simply in some systems one of 2 drivers (used to) crash(-es), the offload bits you assume making 23.05 fast were never there, 24.10 will be identical if not better than 23.5.
so far in my testing, I am not seeing that. 24.10 maxes out a single CPU core and limits peak speeds to about 700Mbps. With 23.05 & NSS, it does the full 940Mbps and 0-1% CPU usage. It is a drastic difference. I was under the impression from the threads I have seen on here that the difference was due to hardware offloading in the NSS drivers. Maybe there is another setting somewhere that might fix this disparity?
ath10k is single irq.
Lets take a more structured approach.
Connect wired, didable firewall offload.
X/ save test result link from
https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat
And try re-balancing interrupts between cores
A/ set network/global/packet steering to `ll cpys
B/ set A to none but install and enable irqbalance.
choose best of three.
do 2 reports with 2 distinct wifi drivers.
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OK, so I have flashed 24.10.1 with all the fully updated stock packages. The only thing I have added to the standard 24.10.1 is btop. this means ath10k-ct is installed and fully updated and all wifi radios completely disabled/off. i'm wired directly to the EA7500V1 with a PC.
- X - firewall offload = None, Interface/global/packet steering=Disabled https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=4e949fd9-2a6b-4452-907d-ba9179e22a76
- A - Firewall Offload = None, Interface/global/packetsteering=Enabled, Steering flows = standard(none) https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=8932e9d8-04ed-489a-b45e-82d2237088db
- B - Firewall Offload = None, Interface/global/packetsteering=Enabled, Steering flows=128 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=2b23e9d8-3fc0-4912-9ef9-543f504e9d85
- C - Firewall Offload = None, Interface/global/packetsteering=Enabled, Steering flows=256 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=402fb386-fbee-4b0f-93af-51f49d0c0e72
- D - Firewall Offload = None, Interface/global/packetsteering=Enabled(all CPUs), Steering flows=128 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=f5532f04-de74-447f-8084-b80407ef9d49
- E - Firewall Offload = None, Interface/global/packetsteering=Enabled(all CPUs), Steering flows=256 https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat?test-id=4b84a75d-48a1-4146-83a6-8fbd7c2de198
Is that what you were looking for? I wasn't sure what the 2 distinct wifi drivers comment was about but I haven't done anything with wifi drivers.
Thank you so much for your help.
OK , it got better.
the "steering flows" setting is for openwrt host itself, does not improve forwarding.
network/intetfaces/global/
Steering enabled is best so far
F/ set steering to "none", install irqbalance package, enable the service either via /etc/config/ or luci-app
out of 3 steering variants + this choose best. Obviously uninstall irqbalance if no benefit.
G/ enable firewall software oiffload in Network/firewall
H/ opkg list-installed | grep ath10 will show 3 packages, among them kmod-ath10k(-ct) and firmware package(s). note them and measure over wifi in least used channel, with AP directly visible
J/ remove kmod and firmware package and install other set (remove or add -ct on both, not touchong board package(s) ), best done wired because eventual reboot would leave wifi inoperational if you mistype.
Installing irqbalance didn't really impact anything. When I do firewall offload, I can get up to around 700Mbps WAN performance but that is it due to CPU being maxed out at 100%.
kind of expected unless
The intent is to spread network processing to all cores present in system. You gave to enable irqbalance in /etc/config/irqbalance to start it.
In Luci, there is an irqbalance menu. When clicking on it, at the very top there is a green status that says "running." I assume this means irqbalance is running, correct? The luci menu had a checkbox to enable it that switched it from not running to running.
And the measurements without and with sw offload?
with offload, I can hit 700Mbps. Without I cant break 600.