Chris from Linux After Dark AKA @GreenSysAdmin writes in to defend the Magic little Pi.

I was just listening to LUP 425 and you brought up the idea of using a Raspberry Pi as a router. Whilst you almost certainly shouldn't use one as a router for a heavy production setup like yours, I thought I would write in and defend the little magic box's corner a little bit.

The Pi4 was immediately jumped upon by the OpenWRT community as a potentially powerful little edge device thanks to the fact that it has a true gigabit NIC and a separate USB 3.0 bus, and you would be surprised at the performance it can eek out!

https://forum.openwrt.org/t/a-few-sqm-benchmarks/71479
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/raspberry-pi-4-vs-edgerouter-x/103873/

So much so, it has actually become a "stickied" budget recommendation for 500Mbps-1Gbps WAN links.

"The real world performance numbers show that it can route and SQM gigabits of packets using 25% of its CPU capacity or so. If you buy the 2GB version and a case and power supply and the UE 300 USB ethernet dongle, it winds up being closer to $120"

Initially OpenWRT support was limited to daily snapshots, but as of the recent 21.02 release it is now an officially supported device.

There is the issue of running OpenWRT from an SD card or USB storage device - possible, and OpenWRT provides squashfs images to reduce writes (as well as ext4 ones), but it just isn't quite the same as NAND soldered to the board...

I still don't think that a Pi4 (or CM) would be the solution for JB - it is just too janky - but I thought I would chime in with how surprisingly performant it is for such a cheap device. You probably want something a bit more robust though I reckon.

Also, a final note - I have been running a Wireguard server on my OpenWRT router (a flashed Linksys consumer unit) for some time with great results. I figure running it on the gateway works well - if that goes down there is no point having a Wireguard server anyway, eh?

Really enjoying LUP as always, and thanks for the shout-out for Linux After Dark on the latest episode! Podcasters unite.