What's the most (powerful/best?) Pi computer for OpenWrt. Looking for Wired router only, have dedicated AP

[mello]

I see that some people recommend Pi4. But what version works best with OpenWrt. Where can I get a Pi already assembled in a case? I can put it together myself, I'm just lazy and afraid I'll break something in my excitement to put it to good use. And what Ethernet adapter works with Pi? I would like 2.5G adapter for future ISP upgrades and future Pi upgrades to 2.5G. I already plan to get the maximum ram and storage possible on board the Pi.
Can you recommend a 2.5G or faster switch too? I would prefer a fully managed switch. I currently use a EdgeRouter X with OpenWrt running the new stable version. I've been running the RC releases all summer and am not satisfied with the ER-X.

I have no experience with Pi. I have plenty of experience with building hardware from scratch and I pretty much use Linux distro for the last 20 years. Though my OpenWrt fun only begin in June of this year running the 22 RC releases.

Thank you.
Nate

[shdf]

what is your budget ?

[diizzy]

RK3399 is faster and works....

[anomeome]

thread, probably better than shoehorning a PI.

[d687r02j8g]

What issues do you have with the edgerouter x?

Theres a patch that enables 1 Gbps routing. It's been added to the snapshot builds now.

2 Gbps WAN/LAN NAT Routing on ramips MT7621 devices

18th of April 2023 Update Here is some information to prevent repeat questions directed at me. This won't be on 22.03, only newer versions will have it as the patch was made at that time frame, and there's no need to spend time and effort backporting to older versions. For the devices listed under the "RGMII2 pins are used with an external phy on these:" and "RGMII2 pins are used as GPIO on these:" lists, the feature will work with changes on the devicetree of the said device, except some rare…

[mello]

Thanks for the link. I see that this didn't make it to 22.0.3 release. I'll switch over to that thread.

[mercygroundabyss]

Pi is not a router. it only has a single lan port. It also does NOT have hardware accelerated encryption. VPNs are crippled in speed due to this.

FriendlyElec have a range of dual port routers like the R4S and R5/6 series. Any of them will kick a pi into a cocked hat. The newer R5/R6 also have 2.5Gb LAN.

Add a high speed switch and dedicated AP like a Ubiquiti and you have a robust network solution.

NanoPi R4S-RK3399 is a great new OpenWrt device

Welcome R4S club SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with dual-Core Cortex-A72 up to 2.0GHz, quad-core Cortex-A53 up to 1.5GHz, Mali-T864 GPU with OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1, OpenCL, DX11, and AFBC support, 4K VP9 and 4K 10-bit H265/H264 60fps video decoder System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – MicroSD card slot Networking – 2x GbE(RTL8211E 1Gbps - RTL8111H 1Gbps), including one native Gigabit Ethernet, and one PCIe Gigabit Ethernet USB – 2x USB 3.0 Type-A ports, USB 2.0 via 4-pin header E…

R68s a new openwrt arm device. RK3568 2*2.5G+2*1G

It's also like an imitator of friendlylec r4s, but i think it is much biggger than r4s to contain 4 Rj45 ports.Volume is a deduction item. This is a product launched by a small hardware manufacturer in China. It may be released in June. At present, the price is not clear, but the manufacturer said it would be released on May 1. And the manufacturer said it would be a very surprising price. I guess it should be cheaper than j4125. I'm thinking about which is better, j4125 or this. I didn't get…

[slh]

I wouldn't go that far, although I'm not a fan of the RPi universum myself.

@mercygroundabyss

it only has a single lan port.

USB3/ rtl8152 is a proven method to add a second port, the dfrobot baseboard for the CM4 an even better (but more expensive) option, both of these are fine for 1 GBit/s wirespeed.

@mercygroundabyss

It also does NOT have hardware accelerated encryption.

For a router, hardware acceleration is often overstated, if it really improves speed can be questioned (there is quite an overhead to use the openssl engines and often the h/w codecs aren't well optimized for this purpose) and the software implementation might often be faster; obviously Broadcom being (pretty much) the only vendor not having licensed the ARMv8 crypto extensions isn't nice either (just for the sake of being special and cheap). Wireguard wouldn't profit from hardware crypto anyways, for OpenVPN your bottleneck is elsewhere (kernel <> userspace communication) and IPsec/ IKEv2 is rarely used these days (yes, there is supposed to come kernel assisted OpenVPN support in the future, but that isn't there yet).

@mercygroundabyss

FriendlyElec have a range of dual port routers like the R4S and R5/6 series.

From the benchmarks I've seen so far, the RPi4 is ahead in terms of routing speed with sqm/ cake over these rockchip based devices (disclaimer, no personal experience with either) - and the r5s isn't necessarily strictly faster than the r4s (as it lacks the A72 performance cores of the r4s, although it bumps the a53 cores to a55 spec).

@mercygroundabyss

The newer R5/R6 also have 2.5Gb LAN.

It will be really interesting to put this up to a test with real silicon, while I would believe that it can route at 2.5GBASE-T wirespeed, I'm much less convinced if it can also to sqm/ cake at the same time (taking the r4s as an example, which apparently can't do 1 GBit/s wirespeed with sqm/ cake, while the RPi4 apparently can do that).

I don't want to diminish these rochchip SBCs, they are very interesting - and I'd personally even prefer them over the RPi4 (better mainline coverage, nicer board integration with two onboard NICs, cheaper than dfrobot baseboard + CM4), but in terms of practical performance results with OpenWrt and sqm/ cake, the RPi4 option appears to win.