What is capabilities of internal IPQ6010 switch-chip on platform CAP AX? On this page: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Switch+Chip+Features no information about it.
The Introduction section has two tables. The second table has this row:
| C52iG-5HaxD2HaxD-TC (hAP ax2), C53UiG+5HPaxD2HPaxD (hAP ax3), Chateau ax series | IPQ-PPE (ether1-ether5) |
On that page IPQ-PPE is the switch chip model number used in 7th column of first table.
Look here as well https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Bridging+and+Switching#BridgingandSwitching-BridgeHardwareOffloading See Note:
6. Currently, HW offloaded bridge support for the IPQ-PPE switch chip is still a work in progress. We recommend using, the default, non-HW offloaded bridge (enabled RSTP).
For IPQ-PPE “Vlan table” is “no”. Does it not support vlans at all, or work in progress?
The first column says “Features in Switch menu” which almost certainly means that hardware has support for lots of features. But right now it’s only possible to configure them via mentioned menu. The rest of columns indicate particular features, which may be offloaded to HW from bridge configuration. As development continues, it is realistically to expect to see more green fields for IPQ-PPE. But right now, if you create a bridge like this
/interface/bridge/add name=bridge vlan-filtering=yes
this automatically means that all bridge traffic will be handled by CPU (and not by IPQ chip).
VLAN feature is always supported by CPU alone as the worst case. Switch Chip Features page is about hardware level acceleration.
Switch chip features vary from no hardware support to fully hardware offloaded. Be aware other functions like firewall interact with hardware offload.
IPQ6010 switch chip is on the lower end of switch chip features and higher end of CPU performance which why they are “router” and not “switch” products.
Note 6 is about implementing additional hardware offload as the software evolves.
There might be relevant offload functionality in the IPQ PPE chip and the owners of the AX routers may get a powerful hardware switching capabilities at some point …
https://lwn.net/Articles/957358/
https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/4bc0aff5-8a1c-44a6-89d8-460961a61310@lunn.ch/T/
Two years have passed and that page still has the same ‘a work in progress‘ comment.
So I guess it’s safe to assume that HW offloading will never happen for IPQ-6010/IPQ-PPE?
Yep ![]()
Come on Mikrotik. This soc / chipset is really great if fully exploted.