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Comment by sq_ | Hacker News Reader

Wonder if there's a chance some of the router projects and Pine64 could collaborate somehow to make a fully open router. Pine64 seems to be quickly developing some production chops and the various router projects also seem to be doing great work.

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PC Engines makes a long-term series of pretty open router boards that works with vanilla Debian, current iteration is APU2: https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

It is pricier than low-end router, but they are high performance and are much easier to use.

One plus of this over just using old PC hardware is that you have a proper physical serial port and no video interface at all— there's no failure mode which exists on it that will have you dragging over a monitor and paging through BIOS screens or whatever in the corner of your basement.

If Pine64 threw a bunch of Ethernet ports into a Clusterboard that'd be a pretty killer platform for a router. Start with one SOPINE for the actual router stuff, then add more for things like NAS, print servers, home streaming, home automation, etc.

The issue with that is it's A64 based, you only get one native 1Gbps port on that and you kinda need at least 2 if you're using a router for it's routing functionality.

You could get a rockpro64 and stick a nice network card in it's pci-e slot and probably outperform the clusterboard.

The Clusterboard solves that issue by including a built-in unmanaged switch (which is indeed how all 7 SOPINEs can share a single Ethernet port). So a router-capable Clusterboard seems like it'd just be a matter of adding more ports (be it by using the same switch chipset and swapping SOPINEs for ports or by using a different chipset with support for more than 8 ports - assuming that the chip in question is indeed limited to 8 ports).

Unfortunately I can't seem to find any detailed info on the Clusterboard components/schematics on their wiki, so I don't know what more it'd entail.

Ofcourse you can add a switch to it but that doesn't magically give you more routing bandwidth. You'd have to do router-on-a-stick which halves your bandwidth

Good point. And the SODIMM-based pinout doesn't seem to include support for PCI-E or additional Ethernet, so that is indeed a bit limiting (though I'm betting some of the pins could be repurposed if both ends are configured for it, e.g. if there was some way for a SOPINE and baseboard to negotiate "hey, neither of us have camera support, so let's use the camera pins for extra Ethernet").

Turris Omnia is supposedly one of these routers. I have their old model from a few years back, and it's been serving quite well for all my needs. The OS is their custom version of OpenWRT, and you can do stuff like LXC, Wireguard and all that quite easily.

The only problem is the ARMv7 hardware, which doesn't really cut it with modern Internet speeds anymore, especially with Wireguard.

That said, I can't wait for pfSense and opnSense finally support Wireguard. And pihole should finally get a FreeBSD version. I'd much more prefer the sense systems over the wrt, but the time is not yet here.

I think the big motivation for the Omnia is the Turris project, not open source per se. Security threat analysis and automatic updates from the nonprofit organization that runs the Czech DNS registrar. LXC, Wireguard, and the customization options from the mini-PCIe slots are a bit of a bonus.

The Omnia doesn’t have great OpenWRT upstream support, and the wireless performance sucks. 2GB of RAM seems enormous for a router, but when I put a medium-size number of clients on it (100-ish), its security monitoring features overran the memory and oom-killed essential services. Fortunately, that can be turned off.

And the Turris project seems to be retreating from modern Internet speeds. The Omnia can’t keep up with 1Gb full-duplex fiber, but they’ve moved onto their next product: The MOX/Shield is even slower. (1.6 GHz CPU vs 1.0 GHz CPU)

I have recently (one week ago) found out that MOX can easily route (and maybe even NAT) 2.5gbps with just about 50% of CPU usage, via the XDP framework. Unfortunately it is not easy to get XDP to endusers.

For me the interesting part on MOX is modularity. You can have 24 switched ethernet ports, which is interesting for network admins at least.

…So it can route 2.5 Gbps, by cutting out Linux’s entire networking stack and rebuilding the minimum necessary in eBPF. Not slowed down by NAT or TC yet.

How do you do the I/O? As I understand the MOX, it has one SGMII interface for the built-in 1G Ethernet port, SDIO and PCIe for the WiFi interfaces, and a single 2.5 Gbps SGMII interface to the rest of the Ethernet ports. To get 24 ports, you connect 8-port modules together via their 2.5 Gbps SGMII interfaces.

Seems like the I/O should be enough for 1 Gbps full-duplex, which is enough for a home router with a gigabit Internet connection, but it can’t do 2 Gbps full-duplex.

What do you mean by "doesn't really cut it with modern Internet speeds anymore"?

Turris Omnia can route 2.5gbps easily, via SFP cage.

Not when running Wireguard client in it. Without I get 1 Gbps, but when having Wireguard on, we peak at 300 Mbps, loads between 3 to 5 and the CPU temperature goes above 100 degrees.

I put the system now to a spot where it kind of has lots of air around, so the temps peak only around 95 degrees now, but the loads are still crazy.

btw there is a possibility for porting Omnia on FreeBSD, so pfSense support :)

ANY more work in this space would be great. The SG1100 seems similar already though. Most configs of the Pine64 I'm looking at are single Ethernet port though, I'm not a fan of the router on stick config, even the one in the SG1100 is confusing internally.

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