Although there is a FastTrack hardware offloading switch, I don’t see any connections actually using hardware offloading.
Fasttrack is primarily a software-based (though hardware assisted on many models, including yours) offloading. In this mode, it accelerates forwarding 3-5x.
It should be on by default on your device. It's activated on a per-connection basis by the "fasttrack-connection" firewall action in your filter->forward section.
It's activity can be monitored in several ways. Connections get the "F" flag, and you should see the counters for the "fasttrack counter dummy rules" at the top of your firewall rules.
On some models fasttrack can also push a limited number of connections to be fully handled by the hardware flow table. This is not available for your device. Support for this is only available for the bigger and fancier Marvell switch chips.
Again, the device is set up to fasttrack connections in its default config.
Just guessing here, but one thing that may cause you to think it's not active is that fasttrack only works for forwarded connections, not those where the router itself is one end of the connection.
Thank you for your reply. My FastTrack is indeed working. As you mentioned, my device doesn't support flows being fully handled by the hardware flow table, so I'm very curious about what the "HW Offload" option in FastTrack actually does.
Hw-offload means to mark the connection as a candidate for offloading to the flow table. Both fasttrack and fasttrack with hw-offload only allow these offloadings to happen, but they're actually done only if all other conditions are met.
So in your situation it does exactly nothing. It does add the flag to the connection in the conntrack table though, if that's any comfort ![]()
Thank you, now I understand that enabling this option is completely useless for my device.
In 7.21 that option will be gone for routers such as yours. You won't be able to see or set it anymore on your hEX refresh.