Hi. Many people have devices on this CPU. It would be great if the developers in v7 ROS, in addition to Vlan Offload, implemented HW NAT, Routing, QoS. Is there hope for these features in future releases? For example, OpenWRT has released firmware for hEX with HW NAT support.
Link - MT7621A.
I doubt that QoS can be offloaded. On Ubiquiti ER-X, which is also based on MT7621A, you can see what things are offloaded by enabling “hwnat” offload (which is main “offloading on/off switch” on the ER-X, the only other configurable offload setting is for ipsec, and that is only for doing the encryption part). But note that using any of the following features will disable offloading for any traffic affected, Netflow, QoS (traffic control), or Bonding. The Cavium chip used in the ER-4 does support bonding offload.
The point is, QoS is much more involved than nat, so I doubt that MikroTik, or OpenWRT or Ubiquiti will ever be able to offload that. And there are many “flavors” of QoS, which one are you even referring to?
Have you done any testing comparing OpenWRT performance to ROS v7 for nat? On the ER-X hwnat can make a significant difference, but also can introduce anomalies. I have 100Mbps internet and I don’t use hwnat on my ER-X because it doesn’t make any difference, and I use smart-queue QoS on my internet interface, so that will essentially disable offload anyway. And offloading doesn’t affect the ability to use hardware vlan-aware mode on the ER-X, so the switch can handle vlans without CPU intervention (like recent versions of ROS with the MT7621A).
I haven’t done any “benchmarks” comparing hEX S with ROS v7.2rc4 to ER-X EdgeOS v2.0.9-hotfix.2 as far as routing, basic firewall, and NAT masquerade, i.e. a setup similar to many consumer home routers.
The site of this cpu does not even say what kind of qos is supported. I came across this video and got curious.. But there, to be honest, as it seemed to me, there is not a very big difference (apparently due to the small number of NAT connections). CRS3 series, NAT rules applied to the offloaded Fasttrack connections get processed by HW too - does it make sense to implement this in ROS 7 for mt7621a. There is nothing about HW Routing on your link. Apparently there are some problems in the implementation.
This is only a guess. It is possible they are referring to the PCP (8 priority levels) and DE (drop eligible) (4 bits of the vlan tag). And that’s all at layer 2.
As far as the “offloading” on the ER-X, it can make a significant difference, but it can also cause problems, and there are many other features that will prevent it from being used.
If all you are running is iperf3, it can be the difference between ~215 Mbps without to over 900 Mbps with (unidirectional traffic). But as I said, I don’t use it at home, because I use smart-queue and that will make the traffic ineligible for offload. This Tom Lawrence video shows a demo of the iperf3 testing with/without.