4 ms·

The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter" series features Cavium Octeons. They're moderately fast MIPS64 SoCs with hardware offload for a lot of common network operations. Op

by hapless 10y ago

The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter" series features Cavium Octeons. They're moderately fast MIPS64 SoCs with hardware offload for a lot of common network operations. OpenBSD does have a port for the ER series, but it's separate from the SGI MIPS ports: https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html https://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html

justin66 10y ago
How good is that edgerouter hardware? The price is pretty attractive. (I just realized that's a pretty subjective question but I actually am interested in the opinion of someone who has interest in the odd corners of openbsd)
- rufius 10y ago
  I have one for my gigabit connection at home and quite like it. It's able to hit about 933mbps to WAN->LAN which is important. Note: I don't use OpenBSD on it, just the default OS which is a custom roll of Debian.
  - aomix 10y ago
    It's worth noting that hitting that performance relies on hardware acceleration not available on OpenBSD. I've read it can still manage ~100 mbps on OpenBSD which should be good enough for most people. But keep that in mind if you want serious routing performance and OpenBSD.
    - justin66 10y ago
      Is that a hardware acceleration of some portion of the network stack that's not carrying over to OpenBSD? It's certainly not a problem for me if that's really just a limit on bandwidth, and not some kind of additional CPU load or network latency.
      - aomix 10y ago
        I believe the router relies on a binary blob that lets EdgeOS (based on Vyatta which is based on Debian) offload routing to some specialized hardware. I run a OpenBSD router in a PC Engine Apu1d and it's more than fast enough. I can hit 700+ mbps on iperf with a basic pf rule set. Since OpenBSD is in the middle of updating their network stack to enable SMP I'd bet that number will rise with the next couple releases. I found mailing list posts from a year ago that have the iperf benchmarks of the apu1d right at 500 mbps. I'm interested to see if the network changes that landed in 6.0 will mean a measurable difference. This is entirely academic on a 30 mbps connection but I like it when numbers change.

by hapless 10y ago

justin66 10y ago

How good is that edgerouter hardware? The price is pretty attractive. (I just realized that's a pretty subjective question but I actually am interested in the opinion of someone who has interest in the odd corners of openbsd)

rufius 10y ago
I have one for my gigabit connection at home and quite like it. It's able to hit about 933mbps to WAN->LAN which is important. Note: I don't use OpenBSD on it, just the default OS which is a custom roll of Debian.
- aomix 10y ago
  It's worth noting that hitting that performance relies on hardware acceleration not available on OpenBSD. I've read it can still manage ~100 mbps on OpenBSD which should be good enough for most people. But keep that in mind if you want serious routing performance and OpenBSD.
  - justin66 10y ago
    Is that a hardware acceleration of some portion of the network stack that's not carrying over to OpenBSD? It's certainly not a problem for me if that's really just a limit on bandwidth, and not some kind of additional CPU load or network latency.
    - aomix 10y ago
      I believe the router relies on a binary blob that lets EdgeOS (based on Vyatta which is based on Debian) offload routing to some specialized hardware. I run a OpenBSD router in a PC Engine Apu1d and it's more than fast enough. I can hit 700+ mbps on iperf with a basic pf rule set. Since OpenBSD is in the middle of updating their network stack to enable SMP I'd bet that number will rise with the next couple releases. I found mailing list posts from a year ago that have the iperf benchmarks of the apu1d right at 500 mbps. I'm interested to see if the network changes that landed in 6.0 will mean a measurable difference. This is entirely academic on a 30 mbps connection but I like it when numbers change.