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Are there any routers that uses the 5.4 or later kernel? 3rd party or OEM

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lagrave

Regular Contributor
Are there any routers that uses the 5.4 or later Linux kernel? 3rd party or OEM firmware.

I want 5.4 because it has native support for exFat (FUSE isn't good enough for me).
 
Not sure how good that implementation is in 5.4, Samsung redid the exFAT driver in Kernel 5.7, from what I heard it was a bit shoddy before that.
 
The kernel version alone isn't sufficient, the firmware also needs to be designed to recognize and handle exFAT disks. Likewise, a router, may be using an older kernel, but use a third party driver to add support for it. You will have to specifically look for exFAT support.
 
The kernel version alone isn't sufficient, the firmware also needs to be designed to recognize and handle exFAT disks. Likewise, a router, may be using an older kernel, but use a third party driver to add support for it. You will have to specifically look for exFAT support.
Can you suggest any combination of HW and SW that works good with exFat in the high end of the spectrum (preferably an AX-router). Cost is secondary.

I want to connect a ≈ 10 TB mechanical disk to the router and share it on the network for backup purposes.
 
Out of the box TP-Link's current AX routers if I recall support exFAT, as for using OpenWRT, modern Broadcom based routers (essentially most of Asus and Netgear's lineup) don't work well with it as Broadcom isn't very open source friendly so good luck with the WiFi portion. For OpenWRT you would be looking at a good Qualcomm based router like the Netgear R7800 or any other brand equivalent, which means AC/WiFi-5, as far as I know the QCA drivers on OpenWRT aren't yet stable for any of the AX routers.

Aside from TP-Link, your best options are probably to split the router and WiFi functions to separate devices if you want both exFAT and WiFi 6 or maybe just get a cheap NAS for like $250-300.
 
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Can you suggest any combination of HW and SW that works good with exFat in the high end of the spectrum (preferably an AX-router). Cost is secondary.

I want to connect a ≈ 10 TB mechanical disk to the router and share it on the network for backup purposes.
Repurpose an computer/laptop and create an network share.
 
Can you suggest any combination of HW and SW that works good with exFat in the high end of the spectrum (preferably an AX-router). Cost is secondary.

I want to connect a ≈ 10 TB mechanical disk to the router and share it on the network for backup purposes.

exFAT is a lousy choice - if it's just being shared to the network you're better off running a linux native filesystem ( ideally ext3 or better as on a drive that big you really want a journalled filesystem)

but as someone else already said why even bother with the drive being direct attached to the router - speed will be throttled for sure, and 1-2 bay dedicated NAS's are cheap and do the job so much better (even a lowly ds120j would be better performing)
 
exFAT is a lousy choice - if it's just being shared to the network you're better off running a linux native filesystem ( ideally ext3 or better as on a drive that big you really want a journalled filesystem)
What's wrong with exFat? I had the impression that it was a reasonable general purpose FS. I have it on my Lacie Fuel and it seems to work fine, being stable etc.
but as someone else already said why even bother with the drive being direct attached to the router - speed will be throttled for sure, and 1-2 bay dedicated NAS's are cheap and do the job so much better (even a lowly ds120j would be better performing)
What is the bottleneck? The router CPU? I thought high end AX-routers or so had pretty powerful CPUs? The purpose is backups that will run in the middle of the night when the router will be idle anyway. Don't you think its CPU can handle this without too much effort under such circumstances?
 
What's wrong with exFat? I had the impression that it was a reasonable general purpose FS. I have it on my Lacie Fuel and it seems to work fine, being stable etc.

time to do a chkdsk/fsck on exFAT gets ridiculous as volume size increases - with a proper modernb journalled filesystem that goes away

What is the bottleneck? The router CPU? I thought high end AX-routers or so had pretty powerful CPUs? The purpose is backups that will run in the middle of the night when the router will be idle anyway. Don't you think its CPU can handle this without too much effort under such circumstances?

a cheap dual core celeron NAS will run rings around any SOC you'll find in a consumer router, if you want real speed grab one with a 2.5gbe or 10gbe NIC in it (ideally a 2-bay or greater and run raid0 to get the array speed up to match the network speed)

routers are routers - and make really lousy NAS's - get something that's designed to do the job you want, and which has full support from the vendor for that task
 
a cheap dual core celeron NAS will run rings around any SOC you'll find in a consumer router, if you want real speed grab one with a 2.5gbe or 10gbe NIC in it (ideally a 2-bay or greater and run raid0 to get the array speed up to match the network speed)
Yes, but does that matter? Is a file server so demanding on the CPU?

I already have a NAS, but it has its own problems

 

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