Re: [Cerowrt-devel] wrt1900ac v1 vs v2
On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, John Yates wrote: There are refurbished wrt1900ac units available quite cheap ($10 or $20 more than wrt1200ac). I assume that they are v1 units as the v2 units have only been on the market for a few months. From lurking on this list I get the sense that these will support full sqm in short order (correct?). So what are the differences between wrt1900ac v1 and v2? Is there any reason to pay nearly $100 more for a v2? v1 has Armada XP chipset which has packet accelerator HW in it that OpenWrt doesn't use. v2 has Armada 385 which doesn't have a packet accelerator, but instead has a much better CPU for forwarding packets. So basically if you buy a v1 you'll get a third or so in forwarding performance over the v2 with OpenWrt. With the Linksys firmware I could imagine the v1 is faster than the v2. The v1 has a fan, v2 does not. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, Joe Touch wrote: - CC-rc2 doesn't have a WRT1200AC build presumably I should have used mvebu-armada-385-linksys-caiman, but it's not at all clear Yes, that's the one for the WRT1200AC. It's called caiman internally at Linksys it seems. - and I'd have to install LUCI and/or reinstall factory firmware from the command line, and none of that is all that clear, esp. a recovery route that doesn't involve voiding warranty to wire in a serial port You can flash back the factory firmware without serial, you just use sysupgrade with the Linksys factory image. I've done this. It's not easy to get into the box, and I have plastic dents on my unit now because I failed to understand how it fits together. I also ended up buying pin headers with tweezers to connect the TTL-USB serial device to the connector on the PCB. I have since then received proper cables so now I have wires sticking out and I'm waiting for connectors so I can make a more permanent solution. I have also had to use the serial console on mine because something broke in the upgrade process one of the 30-40 times I did sysupgrade. I won't speak of the declared victory. In my opinion the victory might be there is now knowledge on how to do this and there is substantial awareness in the rest of the industry but it's definitely not executed yet. And yes, you're right, there is very little mainstream about OpenWrt. It's reasonably easy with a lot of devices (and there are guides to read), but it's not like anyone can do it. It's like changing oil in a car, it's not that hard, but if you don't know how to do it, you need to study first and find correct tools in order to do it. Also, if you get it wrong you might damage things. -- Mikael Abrahamssonemail: swm...@swm.pp.se ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
GWB declared victory too early also, so... 0) ubnt's edgerouter series from the X (49 dollars) to the pro - (8 ports, 300 dollars) also has made an investment in making fq_codel and smart queuing easy to use over their last 3 generations of firmware. Vers They are debian based (and closely related to Vyos (formerly vyatta), which also has gained fq_codel support) 1) At the time development ceased directly on cerowrt, all the major home router vendors were planning to release for the christmas season, devices with vastly upgraded shaping and queue management, QoS features - so life was looking promising. And we worked on refining edge cases and moving code upstream into other places in addition to openwrt. All those vendors goofed in some way or another, but did feature Traffic shaping with X prominently on the box, where X was Streamboost, Dynamic QoS or some other new marketing catchphrase, with a lovely gui - netgear's X4 gui was particularly promising... and their implementation the best of what I benchmarked - but the X4 was very flaky wifi-wise... and every vendor had no way to turn off nat. Buffalo may have got it more right but I never got around to test it (they use dd-wrt). all of them missed the need for framing compensation on dsl and ppoe technologies. I realize that getting these right is a human factors nightmare, but you have to get them right. Also from a human factors perspective, people seemed to think people wanted pinpoint control of bandwidth for everything, and developed guis and tools and invasive means (like streamboost doing dpi) to do so. d-link shipped a version of streamboost lacking codel entirely. Another version of their product did good downstream prio but lousy upstream, and fq_codel + sqm-scripts smoked it: http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=61634.0;nowap I tore apart (as publicly as possible!) the flaws in each vendor's implementation earlier this year, and asus, at least, has responded with newer firmware. Most vendors are plagued with 5+ year old kernels, still, and it is only the ones that were on 3.4 or later that could respond. And, we, here, missed the fact that all these new high end home routers used TSO/GSO and especially GRO, heavily, and we had not compensated for that. Cake is a great candidate for the edgerouters and the new higher end gear. Aside from that, on the low end mikrotik has made some encouraging noises. So I do have hope that THIS christmas, effective and correct qos and shaping implementations will begin to arrive across the board. Also the first pie enabled cablemodems should start appearing late this summer for test, and I have a bit of hope for seeing an integrated cablemodem/wifi device from some vendor of showing up also. On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Joe Touch to...@isi.edu wrote: Hi, all, I'm posting because of my recent frustration with the claim that bufferbloat solutions have been pushed up into the OpenWRT and commercial routers. I spent the bulk of last weekend trying to find a COTS WIFI router that supported OpenWRT with bufferbloat (SQM) extensions. I tried a Linksys WRT1200AC, and here's what I found: - Kaloz's 23-Apr-2015 build installs fine and comes up with a web server (LUCI), but does NOT include SQM - trying to install the SQM packages fails due to a kernel version incompatibility (for a 23-Apr-2015 build?!) - CC-rc2 doesn't have a WRT1200AC build presumably I should have used mvebu-armada-385-linksys-caiman, but it's not at all clear - and I'd have to install LUCI and/or reinstall factory firmware from the command line, and none of that is all that clear, esp. a recovery route that doesn't involve voiding warranty to wire in a serial port Given the declared victory (http://www.bufferbloat.net/news/53), perhaps someone one one of these lists can explain why there's no clear information on a current device that supports a current build that actually supports these fixes? I.e., if you were trying to make this obscure, you're doing a very good job. FWIW. Joe ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel -- Dave Täht worldwide bufferbloat report: http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/results/bufferbloat And: What will it take to vastly improve wifi for everyone? https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/makewififast ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
Hi Joe, I like your snark… And I like Rich’s elegant restraint in his response, always polite always friendly. On Jul 7, 2015, at 06:22 , Joe Touch to...@isi.edu wrote: Hi, Rich, On 7/6/2015 7:23 PM, Rich Brown wrote: Hi Joe, The OpenWrt firmware project is a some assembly required affair. That might be less daunting if there were assembly instructions. I.e., I'm suggesting that the instructions need revision. Work there could have a significant payoff in a larger test community (I'm not exactly a hardware noob, but I found it annoyingly obfuscated). Although it's not always easy to find, the site has a number of resources: - Buyer's Guide at http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/buyerguide That is useful for picking from among the currently supported versions, but perhaps it'd be useful to take a colleague with you to a store and see how helpful that all is. It's nearly impossible to find any of the devices in the list or to verify whether a particular device in a box has the required version of motherboard and firmware needed. I agree, it is almost inexcusable that the openwrt developers do/did not strong-arm all hardware vendors into sane product naming practices, like changing a products name when the interior parts change ;) Honestly though, no one is really happy about the current state of affairs I assume, but only the vendors are in a position to change this. So I applaud your insight, but think you should bring this specific discussion to the vendors... - The specific guidance to search Amazon for OpenWrt - see: http://amzn.to/1mONYr0 That turns up quite a bit of devices that aren't supported, FWIW. - The forum at: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewforum.php?id=10 mentions lots of routers Indeed; more isn't better. As for specific routers: - The WNDR3800 remains our gold standard for CeroWrt builds. It'll do SQM up to ~30 mbps, then the CPU runs out of gas. May I also suggest moving to another standard that hasn't been explicitly end-of-life'd by the manufacturer. Sure, what would you recommend? - Check the OpenWrt Table of Hardware (ToH) to see what other routers support the current stable 14.07/Barrier Breaker (BB) builds. Sure - I spent several days in Target, Best Buy, and Fry's trying to decipher whether particular products were supported - again often difficult without UPC numbers (boxes don't always indicate version) Yes, luckily many stores offer a no-questions-asked return policy, so that opening the box does not necessarily mean you have to buy it. - Many people on this list have good luck with the TP-Link Archer C7 v2. I believe it'll route at cable speeds. I'm using it very successfully with OpenWrt BB release on a 7 mbps DSL line. Here's a good example of how useful the information on the OpenWRT website can be. Everyone seems to refer to this as Archer C7, everyone except the TP-Link website. Their search finds no products matching that description, and the WIFI routers there are listed with other codes, e.g.:TL-WDR7500 - except you won't find that number on the hardware page -- you have to click through to the page for that device. Google is my friend, third link from googling “Archer C7 tp link: http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/cat-9_Archer-C7.html Again, to-link is not very consistent with its naming, but please take this fight to to-link, hoping that the openwrt/cerowrt crowd will be able to fix to-link’s site is a tad optimistic… For that device, like for many, the most recent version (i.e., the one more likely to arrive on a blind web order, or on most store shelves) is not yet supported. - If you have been following the Linksys WRT1900AC and WRT1200AC thread at https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=50173action=newyou'll see that the CC builds are sorta, kinda working. There are a lot of moving pieces still, and despite the CC RC2 status, stable builds only come out a few days apart. I would stay away from it if you're not willing to participate in a science experiment. Well, the 23-Apr-2015 build by Kaloz works fine - except that the SQM package fails to install. What are the symptoms of that failure, if I might ask? What I'm baffled by here is that the main trunk builds leave LUCI out; that's seems quite short-sighted, IMO. I think the reasoning is that normal mortals should use stable releases like BB which come with luci by default, trunk is targeting people that can solve small issues like installing packages. That said, I would also prefer if luci or at least a GUI would be part of the trunk builds as well. One advantage of leaving luci and other non-essetials out is that the firmware image stays small enough to also work on flash starved devices... There is a team working to improve the OpenWrt site, but our work has not yet been blessed by the the admin's who maintain the
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
Rich Brown writes: With that framework in mind, let me respond to your questions. TL;DR - if you just want to fix your home network today and get on with your life, I recommend: - OpenWrt Barrier Breaker (BB) release. As of July 2015, it's the stabl e version. Stay away from CC or trunk, as they're still evolving. - Install OpenWrt using the instructions at: http://wiki.openwrt.org/do c/howto/installopenwrt - Install SQM/fq_codel to solve bufferbloat using the instructions at: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/sqm - What router to choose? I bought the TP-Link Archer C7 v2 for ~$90 (US ). http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500 In a one-out-of-one test, i t seems to work well with BB, SQM works fine, and I'm happy. This message made me realize I hadn't posted the CC+SQM HOWTO I wrote, maybe it will be useful, https://we.riseup.net/lackof/openwrt Feedback welcome. -- Matt Taggart m...@lackof.org ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
Some questions: On 7/6/2015 11:16 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: ... You can flash back the factory firmware without serial, you just use sysupgrade with the Linksys factory image. How does that differ from mtd, e.g., as indicated here (which doesn't mention sysinstall)?: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/generic.uninstall Joe ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] wrt1900ac v1 vs v2
On Tue, 7 Jul 2015, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, John Yates wrote: There are refurbished wrt1900ac units available quite cheap ($10 or $20 more than wrt1200ac). I assume that they are v1 units as the v2 units have only been on the market for a few months. From lurking on this list I get the sense that these will support full sqm in short order (correct?). So what are the differences between wrt1900ac v1 and v2? Is there any reason to pay nearly $100 more for a v2? v1 has Armada XP chipset which has packet accelerator HW in it that OpenWrt doesn't use. v2 has Armada 385 which doesn't have a packet accelerator, but instead has a much better CPU for forwarding packets. So basically if you buy a v1 you'll get a third or so in forwarding performance over the v2 with OpenWrt. With the Linksys firmware I could imagine the v1 is faster than the v2. The v1 has a fan, v2 does not. From watching the openwrt discussion, it looks like 1900v2 and 1200 share the same driver, which has direct openwrt support from the vendor while 1900v1 had a closed driver that there was later a source version discovered for. I would expect the future support for the 1900v2 and 1200 to be far better than the 1900v1 (especially as supplies of them dry up) so the question is if 3x3 gives you enough value over 2x2 to make it worth getting a 1900v2 instead of a 1200 David Lang ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 8:23 PM, Rich Brown wrote: The WNDR3800 remains our gold standard for CeroWrt builds. It'll do SQM up to ~30 mbps, then the CPU runs out of gas. Could someone on this list please quantify what the CPU runs out of gas means? Is this when steaming full-bandwidth? What happens when this threshold is reached? I'm concerned because my Comcast service runs at 60 Mbps (nominal), and we have been having some intermittent glitches with Netflix. I'm running the last CeroWrt release that Dave Taht published, with default SQM profile enabled. In the interest of family harmony, I've never sat in front of the TV while watching the real-time status on the router, to see if it's even getting close to or going over 30 Mbps. There's usually little else happening on the LAN while Netflix is on. If I am saturating the router (SQM), I'd like to find a better HW solution. However, it seems like getting CeroWRT going on the various Linksys AC1200/1900 models is not as straightforward as on the WNDR3800. - Jim -- Jim Reisert AD1C, jjreis...@alum.mit.edu, http://www.ad1c.us ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
Matt, This is useful. I will review this and give you comments, and ensure any additional knowledge makes it into the OpenWrt HOWTO's. Thanks. Rich On Jul 7, 2015, at 2:19 PM, Matt Taggart m...@lackof.org wrote: This message made me realize I hadn't posted the CC+SQM HOWTO I wrote, maybe it will be useful, https://we.riseup.net/lackof/openwrt Feedback welcome. -- Matt Taggart m...@lackof.org ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] failing to find the declared victory in a current wifi router
Hi Joe, These are great observations. CeroWrt was boosted enormously by the presence of the powerful and reliable OpenWrt software platform. We were able to make so much progress with bufferbloat because OpenWrt provided a stable platform for our experiments. Nonetheless, the motivations of the two teams - CeroWrt and OpenWrt - are vastly different, and I offer the following to help you adjust your expectations. - CeroWrt was, and remains, a research project for making networking better. In 2012, this team of open-source developers solved the problem of bufferbloat. (Hardly any other commercial or academic development group even understood or acknowledged there was a problem.) Now the team is moving on to other projects, including making wifi fast (again, this does not seem to be addressed by any commercial/academic groups). We continue our work with CeroWrt, using a current version of OpenWrt as the base. The Bufferbloat/CeroWrt site has attracted a significant following of people who're willing to test the bleeding edge of network research. The current builds make no promises of reliability (or even functionality), but it's fun to hang out with people who're driving science forward. - I'm a newcomer to OpenWrt, but it seems that their mission is to make the OpenWrt software run on as many different devices/routers as possible. This has a side benefit of making the excellent OpenWrt software available on a number of excellent routers, which, as a second-order side benefit might be useful to make the network better at your home. As far as I can tell, making it easier to learn about, install, and run OpenWrt is not a primary goal. Furthermore, the OpenWrt leaders are reluctant to recommend any particular piece of equipment, to avoid accusations of favoritism. That said, I'm working with a number of people to improve the resources at OpenWrt to pull all the info together so that people can get the benefits of OpenWrt without having to read 10,000 forum posts and wiki pages. With that framework in mind, let me respond to your questions. TL;DR - if you just want to fix your home network today and get on with your life, I recommend: - OpenWrt Barrier Breaker (BB) release. As of July 2015, it's the stable version. Stay away from CC or trunk, as they're still evolving. - Install OpenWrt using the instructions at: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/installopenwrt - Install SQM/fq_codel to solve bufferbloat using the instructions at: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/sqm - What router to choose? I bought the TP-Link Archer C7 v2 for ~$90 (US). http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr7500 In a one-out-of-one test, it seems to work well with BB, SQM works fine, and I'm happy. On Jul 7, 2015, at 12:22 AM, Joe Touch to...@isi.edu wrote: Hi, Rich, On 7/6/2015 7:23 PM, Rich Brown wrote: Hi Joe, The OpenWrt firmware project is a some assembly required affair. That might be less daunting if there were assembly instructions. I.e., I'm suggesting that the instructions need revision. Work there could have a significant payoff in a larger test community (I'm not exactly a hardware noob, but I found it annoyingly obfuscated). Yup. I agree. Although it's not always easy to find, the site has a number of resources: - Buyer's Guide at http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/buyerguide That is useful for picking from among the currently supported versions, but perhaps it'd be useful to take a colleague with you to a store and see how helpful that all is. It's nearly impossible to find any of the devices in the list or to verify whether a particular device in a box has the required version of motherboard and firmware needed. Yup. - The specific guidance to search Amazon for OpenWrt - see: http://amzn.to/1mONYr0 That turns up quite a bit of devices that aren't supported, FWIW. Yup. That's why I'm on the team to improve documentation... We will have a delicate balance between the project founders' reluctance to recommend any devices and the desire help people just to get something going. - The forum at: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewforum.php?id=10 mentions lots of routers Indeed; more isn't better. Yup. As for specific routers: - The WNDR3800 remains our gold standard for CeroWrt builds. It'll do SQM up to ~30 mbps, then the CPU runs out of gas. May I also suggest moving to another standard that hasn't been explicitly end-of-life'd by the manufacturer. The CeroWrt team (Thanks, Dave!) is working hard to find a replacement for the WNDR3800 that will handle higher speeds. Read the cerowrt-devel list frequently (daily?) to follow that news. We'll update the CeroWrt site once there's a good recommendation. - Check the OpenWrt Table of Hardware (ToH) to see what other routers support the current stable 14.07/Barrier Breaker (BB) builds. Sure - I spent several days in Target, Best Buy, and Fry's
Re: [Cerowrt-devel] wrt1900ac v1 vs v2
[ https://community.linksys.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/WRT1900AC-V2/td-p/940588 ]( https://community.linksys.com/t5/Wireless-Routers/WRT1900AC-V2/td-p/940588 ) Shows a v2 with 512M of memory, actually purchased. I would think that the 512 is definitely useful. On Tuesday, July 7, 2015 2:09am, Mikael Abrahamsson swm...@swm.pp.se said: On Mon, 6 Jul 2015, John Yates wrote: There are refurbished wrt1900ac units available quite cheap ($10 or $20 more than wrt1200ac). I assume that they are v1 units as the v2 units have only been on the market for a few months. From lurking on this list I get the sense that these will support full sqm in short order (correct?). So what are the differences between wrt1900ac v1 and v2? Is there any reason to pay nearly $100 more for a v2? v1 has Armada XP chipset which has packet accelerator HW in it that OpenWrt doesn't use. v2 has Armada 385 which doesn't have a packet accelerator, but instead has a much better CPU for forwarding packets. So basically if you buy a v1 you'll get a third or so in forwarding performance over the v2 with OpenWrt. With the Linksys firmware I could imagine the v1 is faster than the v2. The v1 has a fan, v2 does not. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swm...@swm.pp.se ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel ___ Cerowrt-devel mailing list Cerowrt-devel@lists.bufferbloat.net https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
