* https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router_...
I was running OpenWRT on my Xiaomi AX9000 (based on master but also IPQ807 specific forks), but everything OpenWRT is software-based so 1/ the AX9000's acceleration chips are idle & performance is quite limited (unless using one of the crazy experimental NSS builds where mostly everything is broken) 2/ the integration with the onboard switch itself is far from adequate, e.g. VLANS+batman-adv are quite broken - very few configurations yield a partially working network (e.g. randomly dropping ARPs).. and don't count of LACP to work even though it can be configured. That's forgiving the fact that we also have to manually patch the BDF files on OpenWRT for the AX9000 if you want the radios to be connectable, as OpenWRT do not want to ship with the correct BDFs for some vague legal liability reasons.
Used VyOS in Proxmox for a while too, but at the end of the day, the firewall boilerplate is quite huge (and can't easily be edited on the go in the house as necessary), tailscale is not natively supported, etc. Relatively sad to let go of IaaC and committing the configuration though, but somewhat manageable with snapshots.
After a quick look on OpenWRT wiki there is unfortunately not much information on what to be attentive to when running in a vm.
One problem that I have with it is that I'm running qemu-system-x86_64 in an init script which creates a tap0 interface and adds it to the br-lan interface. If I ever restart the networking these interfaces are removed from the bridge. I briefly looked for some sort of hook to run on network restart but didn't find one. I'd love to be able to run brctl after a network restart to add the interfaces back into the bridge.
Use qemu and bridge networking or pass through a physical network device.
> also run it on any x86 machine
With the stock wifi chip and antenna? Or would I need to upgrade?
Asked another way: my old PC can be the "server"? Just like any wifi base station?
It's supposed to perform a scan and then set the country that is advertised by nearby APs. The obvious problem is that it won't work if there are no other wifi networks, or if one is trasmitting the wrong country. Also you have to manually run the scan, before the radio is unlocked, but virtually all AP softwares don't know how to handle this properly and get stuck in a loop.
In any case, they're terrible in AP mode even after unlocking the 5GHz band, because are locked to a single VAP and are not dual-band (I mean, not at same time).
The antennae are useless for my use case, but they came with it and if I removed them I'd just have to find somewhere else to store them...
Edit: ah I didn't see that you run openwrt on baremetal...
https://firmware-selector.openwrt.org/?version=21.02.3&targe... https://openwrt.org/toh/raspberry_pi_foundation/raspberry_pi https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/virtualization/qemu