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One of the most exciting new features is
network flow offloading. For years router manufacturers have used proprietary hardware in order to accelerate NAT throughput. Because of the closed nature of the drivers and the variety of hardware accelerating this throughput OpenWrt hasn't been able to compete in this area, despite all the other advantages it brings.
Now devices running OpenWrt and using the 4.14 kernel have a generic software implementation of network flow offloading. Users have reported that even very low-end devices are hitting full gigabit NAT throughput with it enabled.
I wanted to test it out so i recently picked up a Xiaomi Mi Router 3G. These can be purchased for under £40 new on eBay. I went with this particular model because it's the cheapest router based on the MT7621 SOC which is the first to also have hardware flow offloading under OpenWrt. Replacing the manufacturer firmware requires some hoop-jumping though.
A quick test of NAT LAN->WAN performance using iperf3 showed the following:
- A fresh install of OpenWrt with no changes made: 670Mbps
- Toggling on software flow offloading: 820Mbps
- Toggling on hardware flow offloading: 912Mbps
I've since discovered that the MT76 driver isn't really ready for the 2.4GHz Wifi (5GHz works fine) but with 2.4GHz disabled it has been rock solid for the past few weeks and has actually performed better than the (non-Wifi) pfSense box i was previously using, especially when it comes to mitigating bufferbloat.
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