The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.
That seems like a reasonable criticism and if so it could apply to RPi CM4 as well, AFAIK they don't have network specific accelerators. Are you planning to address this with some additional co-processors?
If you end-up adding network specific accelerators, Please do work with OpenWrt team as lack of HW accelerator support (WiFi offloading) unlike proprietary firmware is a major pain point.
> The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.
Does this really matter? It only has 1Gbps Ethernet, so shouldnt software NAT be fine? I have a significantly less powerful router with no hardware acceleration, and its never been an issue to get maximum speed, though my connection is only 100Mbit (over-provisioned to be about 20% faster).
I've seen the lack of HW NAT impacting performance of Wireless Network over Wired on some aftermarket firmwares for routers, OpenWrt does a decent job of software offloading but as with any SW acceleration the price is paid by the CPU.
Even with OpenWrt there are forks which can make use of HW NAT and give proprietary firmware level performance but are closed source!
Ah interesting. I don't see mention of NAT or address translation at all in the datasheet for the switch I am using. Since the original plan was just to mate CM4s with a switch I hadn't considered any additional network hardware.
This seems like a Rev2 thing. I could get the basic system up and running without additional complexity. But I really like the idea of forks of my work so once I've proven the basic layout I'd be happy to collaborate with the community on improvements.
Do you have any more information on that type of hardware or suggestions on how to learn more? Maybe I should get on the OpenWRT mailing list and introduce myself.
I'm going to be making a video about how I turned an Asus PN50 into an AP using Linux NAT but tbh the performance is pretty bad (but good enough for my home office)... It's also possible I'm configuring it wrongly. The general principles should be the same as RPi and even the net configuration is likely to be identical.
Rpis are notorious for just dying though. You may want to consider something more robust. Don't know if it's SSD corruption or what.
My understanding is that the issues with pi's dying is related to SD cards. But the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) uses industrial eMMC memory which should have a much better lifetime.
> Maybe I should get on the OpenWRT mailing list and introduce myself.
I agree. OpenWrt's HW NAT support seems to be limited to mt7621 (i.e. At least upstream version).
Unless the SoC is purpose built for network computation I don't think they feature HW NAT, But open-source drivers for the SoC's which has HW acceleration is a bigger problem.
I think aiming for a good SW offloading is a more reasonable goal to start with, Which OpenWrt seems to be doing with MIPS based CPUs.
Interesting. The mt7621 is significantly more advanced than the basic switch chip I am using so far. I will continue with my current design and still try to reach out to the OpenWrt community for comment.
The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.
That seems like a reasonable criticism and if so it could apply to RPi CM4 as well, AFAIK they don't have network specific accelerators. Are you planning to address this with some additional co-processors?
If you end-up adding network specific accelerators, Please do work with OpenWrt team as lack of HW accelerator support (WiFi offloading) unlike proprietary firmware is a major pain point.