[Review] - GL.iNet AR300M Travel Router/IOT Hub

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Place marker for now - as I have some open questions to the OEM...

It's a neat little device as a travel router, IOT hub, and developer box - QC-Atheros based and fully supported by OpenWRT. While it's only an N300/WiFi (4) device, the software support makes it worthwhile - and the hardware optimization is pretty interesting - performance isn't bad, and the latest firmware has Wireguard native support for Client and Server, along with OpenVPN.

In the interim - I'll leave you with review by @Xentrk - it's a good read...

I'm looking at the IOT/Developer/Security Analysis perspectives - it'll be fun...

And yes - it can do a solid 100 Mbit/Sec NAT'ed over WiFi and Wired - which is expected with N300 devices that do Fast Ethernet...

VPN...

OpenVPN - 18 Mbit/Sec
Wireguard - 54 Mbit/Sec

To make it interesting - the OpenVPN numbers are decent enough, but WireGuard on this device is very good with the current OpenWRT...

OpenSSL numbers...

root@GL-AR300M:~# openssl speed aes-128-cbc aes-256-cbc bf-cbc

The 'numbers' are in 1000s of bytes per second processed.
type             16 bytes     64 bytes    256 bytes   1024 bytes 8192 bytes
blowfish cbc     10255.75k    10801.76k    11002.17k 10991.51k    10989.54k
aes-128 cbc       7898.53k     8743.75k     8983.77k 9032.03k     9044.08k
aes-256 cbc       6199.34k     6660.18k     6845.89k 6841.77k     6960.41k

Chip Info - SSH'ing into the AR300M....

This is the GL.iNet v3 beta... should be GA later in 01/2019 - it's based close to the OpenWRT 18.06 tip...

BusyBox v1.28.3 () built-in shell (ash)

  _______                     ________        __
 |       |.-----.-----.-----.|  |  |  |.----.|  |_
 |   -   ||  _  |  -__|     ||  |  |  ||   _||   _|
 |_______||   __|_____|__|__||________||__|  |____|
          |__| W I R E L E S S   F R E E D O M
 -----------------------------------------------------
 OpenWrt 18.06.1, r7258-5eb055306f
 -----------------------------------------------------
root@GL-AR300M:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
system type             : Qualcomm Atheros QCA9533 ver 2 rev 0
machine                 : GL.iNet GL-AR300M
processor               : 0
cpu model               : MIPS 24Kc V7.4
BogoMIPS                : 432.53
wait instruction        : yes
microsecond timers      : yes
tlb_entries             : 16
extra interrupt vector  : yes
hardware watchpoint     : yes, count: 4, address/irw mask: [0x0ffc, 0x0ffc, 0x0ffb, 0x0ffb]
isa                     : mips1 mips2 mips32r1 mips32r2
ASEs implemented        : mips16
shadow register sets    : 1
kscratch registers      : 0
package                 : 0
core                    : 0
VCED exceptions         : not available
VCEI exceptions         : not available

root@GL-AR300M:~#

MIPs24KC @ 650MHz - note that the QCA9533 is a single core - for compute performance, it's somewhere between Pi Zero and Pi2 - the ARM on the Pi;a is a bit faster at some things, but networking, the MIPS24KC is faster - which is expected, as the QC-Atheros chip is more focused on networking and parallel tasks... see the NAT and VPN numbers above...

Qualcomm Atheros QCA9531 main features

1. MIPS 24Kc processor, 64KB I-Cache, 32KB D-Cache, clocked at up to 680MHz
2. Support 16bit DDR1, DDR2 (up to 600MT / s)
3. Supports SPI Flash
4. Integrated 5-port Fast Ethernet switch
5. With a PCI Express 1.1 Root Complex interfaces
6. With a USB 2.0 interface
7. Internal integrated RF front-end
8. integrated 1.2V DCDC converter

Anyways - from a dev perspective, this is a mature chip with a long history of dev, so many of the bugs are sorted out from a kernel and peripheral view...

 

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New toy - this is tangentially related to the AR300m...