I now added the two patches discussed in this thread (the hack from the lkml and the PCIe gen2 enablement) and added the tg3 driver, then built a custom OpenWRT image. Very good news: It boots up fine!
Then I have setup a small testbed with four Lenovo Thinkpad X200(s) machines (all with an Intel NIC) and ran a couple of benchmarks and power measures (using a simple wall meter):
The limiting factor in terms of speed seems to be the NIC or maybe thermals (mine lacks a cooler). The CPU load with 4 iperf3-tests running was still at around 30%, so lots of CPU cycles left on the rockpro64 side. Interesting note: When the speed dropped, it dropped on all four machines to the same level.
During the tests, the rockpro64 itself was very stable (no crashes or errors in dmesg).
Here are two pictures illustrating the setup:
overview-web.jpg (Size: 446.54 KB / Downloads: 401)
detail-web.jpg (Size: 262.15 KB / Downloads: 447)
@tllim Firewall-case welcome! Apart from a let's say smaller version of the NAS case I was also thinking about a tall case where the NIC is placed using a PCIe riser card.
As a next step I plan to put the rockpro64 in the NAS case and replace my existing router to see how stable the whole thing runs in a more realistic 24/7-setting. Another goal is to replace the proprietary firmware on the NICs by the free alternative I mentioned earlier in this thread.
Then I have setup a small testbed with four Lenovo Thinkpad X200(s) machines (all with an Intel NIC) and ran a couple of benchmarks and power measures (using a simple wall meter):
Code:
| 0-Links | 1-Link | 2-Links | 3-Links | 4-Links
--------------------------------------------------------
Idle | 5.3 W | 5.8 W | 6.5 W | 7.3 W | 8.1 W
Load | - | 6.4 W | 7.6 W | 8.6 W | 9.4 W
Speed | - | 940 | 930 | 890 | 630
(Mbit/s)The limiting factor in terms of speed seems to be the NIC or maybe thermals (mine lacks a cooler). The CPU load with 4 iperf3-tests running was still at around 30%, so lots of CPU cycles left on the rockpro64 side. Interesting note: When the speed dropped, it dropped on all four machines to the same level.
During the tests, the rockpro64 itself was very stable (no crashes or errors in dmesg).
Here are two pictures illustrating the setup:
overview-web.jpg (Size: 446.54 KB / Downloads: 401)
detail-web.jpg (Size: 262.15 KB / Downloads: 447)
@tllim Firewall-case welcome! Apart from a let's say smaller version of the NAS case I was also thinking about a tall case where the NIC is placed using a PCIe riser card.
As a next step I plan to put the rockpro64 in the NAS case and replace my existing router to see how stable the whole thing runs in a more realistic 24/7-setting. Another goal is to replace the proprietary firmware on the NICs by the free alternative I mentioned earlier in this thread.