Hello,
Today i got a apu1c board from PC Engines. It’s a follower of the well known and awesome Alix Boards. Finally they have a board with Gigabit 
Even if my board will end up as a firewall most properly running pfSense i thought it might be a good idea to test how RouterOS is performing on this board.
The Hardware
- CPU: 1Ghz T40E APU
- RAM: 2GB DDR3-1066 DRAM ( there is also an 4GB Version )
- Power-consumption: 6-12W
- Network: 3x Gbit Realtek RTL8111E
Full technical details: http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.htm
Software
I installed RouterOS x86 on a sd-card. That was a bit painful. As i’m working in a Linux only environment i tried to use the Netinstall from inside my Win7 VM to install it on the sd-card. Netinstall was successful with installing at the card, but it didn’t boot up at the apu board: There was no output on the serial port after loading the kernel.
I wasn’t successful by using netinstall from wine to install it via network either.
At the end i found this way:
-
- Creating a VM Using Virtualbox
- Mapping a USB SD Cardreader into the VM
- Booting the VM with RouterOS install ISO
- Install RouterOS on the SD-card using the VM
Using this installation-procedure i got it booting up at the apu board and showing a login at the serial port.
Tests
For my throughput tests i used following setup:
LaptopA----[ether2]APU[ether3]----LaptopB
MTU:1500
To test the throughput iperf was running on both Laptops. For each test iperf was running for 60 seconds to get a good average value. To testing smaller packet-size i simply used the --mss parameter of iperf. During testing i noticed that a lot of the cpu power is used to handle interrupts ( System → resources → CPU: IRQ ). The Realtek RTL8111E network interfaces could be the reason for that.
TestA: Routing without Firewall,NAT,Connection Tracking
1 TCP connection:
Packets per Sec: ~85k
Throughput by iperf: 937Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~980Mbit/s
CPU Load: 45-50%
10 parallel TCP connection
Packets per Sec: ~90k
Throughput by iperf: 937Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~980Mbit/s
CPU Load: 50-60%
1 TCP connection (–mss 600):
Packets per Sec: ~190k
Throughput by iperf: 814Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~920Mbit/s
CPU Load: ~80%
10 parallel TCP connection(–mss 600)
Packets per Sec: ~180k
Throughput by iperf: 782Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~860Mbit/s
CPU Load: ~80%
TestB: Routing with Firewall,NAT,Connection Tracking
There was no significant different between Firewall without NAT and Firewall with NAT!
1 TCP connection:
Packets per Sec: ~85k
Throughput by iperf: 936Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~980Mbit/s
CPU Load: 50-60%
10 parallel TCP connection
Packets per Sec: ~90k
Throughput by iperf: 938Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~980Mbit/s
CPU Load: 58-65%
1 TCP connection (–mss 600):
Packets per Sec: ~190k
Throughput by iperf: 793Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: ~920Mbit/s
CPU Load: ~80%
10 parallel TCP connection(–mss 600)
Packets per Sec: ~200k
Throughput by iperf: 805Mbit/s
Throughput by Webfig: 870MBit/s
CPU Load: ~85%
First conclusions
The new apu1c board from PC Engines is a decent follower of the well known alix boards. Once you got RouterOS installed on a sd-card it runs at this board without issues. As long as my board is not used in production i’m happy to test other things as well. If anyone has further ideas what test i could run please let me know.