Hardware Offload

RouterOS General
1

Hello All,

I just bought my first Mikrotik and i’m learning a lot. I have a question though with regards to HW offload, i just read that it allows to use switch chip instead of CPU.

Now my question is, I have 2 networks bridge1 and bridge3_lan and from below, you can see that the HW offload is disabled for bridge3_lan, how can i enable it?

I’m using HAP Ac2

[admin@MikroTik] > /interface bridge port print
Flags: X - disabled, I - inactive, D - dynamic, H - hw-offload 
 #     INTERFACE                                                                                      BRIDGE                                                                                     HW  PVID PRIORITY  PATH-COST INTERNAL-PATH-COST    HORIZON
 0     ether2                                                                                         bridge3_lan                                                                            yes    1     0x80         10                 10       none
 1   H ether3                                                                                         bridge1                                                                                    yes    1     0x80         10                 10       none
 2 I H ether4                                                                                         bridge1                                                                                    yes    1     0x80         10                 10       none
 3   H ether5                                                                                         bridge1                                                                                    yes    1     0x80         10                 10       none
 4     wlan2                                                                                          bridge1                                                                                           1     0x80         10                 10       none
 5     wlan1                                                                                          bridge1                                                                                           1     0x80         10                 10       none
[admin@MikroTik] >
2

You can’t, this is a hardware limitation. You should check this wiki page to understand this better:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Layer2_misconfiguration#Bridges_on_a_single_switch_chip

If you are looking for isolated ports, then you might want to consider to use port isolation feature:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Switch_Chip_Features#Port_isolation

3

thats too bad. what i did is i just setup a new bridge for the 2nd network. I just wonder if performance of file transfer can be improve.

This is also not possible by doing VLANs on bridge 1?

4

It is possible to isolate multiple networks using VLANs, even on a hardware level. Check this guide to see how this can be done:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Switch_Router