Alix Apu All In One Board

The Raspberry Pi doesn't have any high-bandwidth peripheral connections, and the CPU is also weak to do high-speed routing with QoS. What'southward needed is an open source board with a modern CPU, a mini-PCIe slot or two for the wifi, and at least i or 2 GigE NICs. In other words, this: http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm Although once you add together the wifi, case, power supply, and SD bill of fare or mSATA SSD, it's a scrap on the expensive side.

I'm a huge fan of ALIX and its successor, APU. I've built dozens of ALIX boxes and nearly have years of uninterrupted uptime running either m0n0 or pfsense. I've never gotten anywhere shut to that with any of the Broadcom or Atheros based embedded platforms which are essentially what you get with a consumer router. People definitely need to be more than aware of the x86 BSD based routing platforms similar m0n0wall: http://m0n0.ch/wall/ and its fork pfsense: https://world wide web.pfsense.org/ I'm surprised the EFF isn't championing some fork of those platforms, or just those two themselves. Trying to fix the problem past adding nevertheless another platform is just going to cause bug. I'thousand a huge fan of the EFF only information technology seems to exist championing rather strange initiatives lately like the open WiFi and now this.

An alternative, if you want to truly get it manufactured yourself (the schematics and materials list are all open source): https://www.turris.cz/en/hardware This device is a lot more than powerful than the PC Engines APU. As nice equally the APU is, its CPU cannot support 1Gbps throughput over the NICs.

Got any references for the relative performance of that over the APU board? They're not using the AMD Geode processors anymore. What y'all linked is a dual-core 1.2GHz 32-bit PPC built on a 45nm process. The APU used on the lath I linked to is a dual-cadre 1GHz x86_64 built on a 40nm process. There's no fashion the PPC core is dramatically faster than the x86 core that was shown to have better IPC than Intel's Atom. The PPC SoC might exist able to offload a lot of network stuff to fixed-office hardware, but one of the principal lessons learned from the CeroWRT project is that you can't trust whatsoever of the offload stuff to be well-behaved with respect to things like queue length management.

Yes. The APU maxes out around ~670Mbit/due south using iperf [1]. I confirmed as much in correspondence with PC Engines also. Personally I _suspect_ it should be able to get much faster, merely haven't got ane to investigate yet. The 1.2GHz PPC based router is hit ~940Mbit/s (the most you can look from a GE interface with protocol overheads) using iperf. I don't have a reference for that, but I've got one of the devices hither and have performed that exam myself. one. http://planet.ipfire.org/mail service/pc-engines-apu1c-a-review

Thank you for the functioning statistics. We have washed a lot of piece of work on other hardware platforms to get them upwards to being able to saturate gigE or higher, with tuning and things like "Byte Queue Limits" support. The problem with the ppc thing is that virtually probable it has bufferbloat in a blob we tin't prepare. (news to the reverse welcomed). And hearing that the APU peaks at 670Mbit is disappointing, but perhaps someone will get some time to profile it and figure out why it is then bad - certainly nosotros get gigE hands with intel based hardware.

Failing a 'dream bard' like you mention a fairly adept alternative is a laptop (scraptop) with a cleaved screen. It may need to be fairly high finish, eastward.k. many Lenovo models I've seen (fifty-fifty Ten series) accept two thou-PCI slots bachelor for Wifi.

I setup a PI with 2 NIC (1 WAN, 1 LAN) + 1 WLAN to human action as a router + AP, and I have to tell y'all its network functioning is pathetic. The clogging for total network bandwidth was somewhere about 37mb/sec. That's not per interface that'south total across all. With WLAN and inexpensive WAN (Fibre or DSL) far exceeding that -- it's a terrible platform to use for this. Especially if you're annihilation other than a casual user. The raspi'due south arm CPU left me with a probably undeserved but less than favourable impression; using qemu to build remotely was also a time consuming annoyance. I ended upwards building a dual core 3ghz router based on shuttle's XH61V as information technology integrates dual gigabit NICs + an atheros USB WLAN for AP. Uses 90w of ability and boots in < ~4s from SSD, running Linux.

90W is rather a lot. I'k looking at the Intel NUCs, which are a lot more meaty and power efficient. Downside is that they simply come with a unmarried Ethernet port so you need to add any additional ones via USB3.

3GHz and 90W is ridiculous for a router. A proficient NIC does not rely on the CPU, so clock speed should be irrelevant. A Mini-ITX board or a router with OpenWRT would be a much more than economic alternative.

A good NIC won't crave much CPU power to bulldoze, simply in order to accept reasonable real-world performance with the networking equipment that actually exists, you need every packet to exist handled past the QoS and AQM systems running on the CPU. Doing that at near-gigabit speeds really does require a beefy CPU, though not a full desktop-course wattage.

Well once I decided to go this route I figured have advantage of the opportunity to put a practiced CPU in information technology and allow it to take over a number of services that I'd previously hosted on some other machine (since retired). Information technology host several services in VMs(dns, transparent HTTP proxy, torrent client running in X11 open via VNC). I also use VPNs quite extensively and seeing as the Intel chip-set doesn't support AES natively, I opted to upward the clock speed of the CPU to the highest I could become it without exceeding my budget.

Alix Apu All In One Board,

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8061165

Posted by: faziopoved1937.blogspot.com

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