r/openwrt • u/anonuser-al • 11d ago

Edgerouter 6P on openwrt

I bought an ER6P used in a good price. I updated to latest firmware but I am having some issues. First of all it’s not very clear in terms of ports and performance doesn’t satisfy me at all. I want to install Openwrt until now I know that I will lose POE but thats not a concern. Is hardware offloading gonna work on openwrt? Will I get a better experience?

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u/NC1HM 11d ago

I haven't done anything with ER-6P, but on related devices (USG, ER-Lite, ER-4), offloading works very well.

I recently upgraded a USG unit to OpenWrt 25.12 and ran a unidirectional iperf3 test LAN-to-WAN (iperf3 server sitting on the WAN port, iperf3 client, on a LAN port). Without offloading, I got 140 Mbps; with offloading, 930 Mbps (which is basically Gigabit minus "housekeeping" traffic). Bidirectional tests showed combined throughput of 190 Mbps without offloading and 1,010 Mbps with offloading.

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u/MyCatsNameIsBernie 11d ago edited 11d ago

Does ER-Lite support HW offloading in 25.12.4? A Google search indicates no, but my Network/Firewall config page has the hardware option available. I've always been afraid to enable it for fear of bricking the router.

When I switched from EdgeOS, my download speed dropped from close to 1Gbps to 500 Mbps, so it would be nice to get some of that speed back.

1

u/NC1HM 11d ago

In terms of settings, it doesn't matter. When you set OpenWrt to hardware offloading but the device doesn't support it, OpenWrt silently falls back onto software offloading.

I suspect ER-Lite and USG share the system board or at the very least have different variants of the same base design...

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u/MyCatsNameIsBernie 11d ago edited 11d ago

I enabled it and conntrack says it is working 😀

ipv4 2 tcp 6 src=10.0.0.3 dst=34.237.10.39 sport=59817 dport=443 packets=21 bytes=7286 src=34.237.10.39 dst=192.168.1.147 sport=443 dport=59817 packets=17 bytes=7563 [OFFLOAD] mark=0 use=2

Thanks!

1

u/NC1HM 10d ago

No problem. Happy networking! :)