HW acceleration/IPv6 issues

[Chris313AllNight]

I'm using Merlin FW 376.44 on an N66U. I've been having issues with losing IPv6 addressing after a few days. I use Comcast as my ISP. After reading this post here:

I suspect most US ISPs should be fine, but I cannot be certain. This probably especially affect ISPs that use VLAN tagging, such as some that provide you with IPTV/VoIP services.

I also know that IPv6 can have issues with HW acceleration enabled, so it could possibly affects those that provide native IPv6, such as Comcast.

I disabled HW acceleration just for giggles, and my IPv6 address magically came back. Is this a choice between having HW acceleration and the best speeds you can have, or having IPv6 addressing and the router tops out at whatever speed you get without HW Acceleration enabled?

Is this something that has or will be fixed in future FW revisions?

 

[RMerlin]

HW acceleration is only needed if your WAN speed is higher than 100 Mbps.

This is closed-source code that only Broadcom has (not even Asus has it), so nobody can answer whether the issue can or will be fixed.

 

[mogulman]

Yeah..I noticed that disabling HW acceleration improved my Asus router stability with IPV6 enabled (comcast). I have a pretty fast internet connection though, so I think I'm going to turn off IPv6 for now.

 

[mogulman]

update...Read some more things on the forum. Seems like some people have tested the routers with HW Acceleration off and it seems to work fine up to around 200Mbs. So I think I'll turn off HW acceleration and turn IPv6 back on.

My speed seems to be around the same with it on or off.

 

[PabloAbonia]

I've tried a multitude of things, and keep bumping into the issue that traceroutes fail from my AC56U router when run on the router, but succeed when run on my LAN devices connected to the router. Pings work for both most of the time. Typically in a few hours IPV6 just fails in general.

Currently HW acceleration is disabled, only innocuous changes to dnsmasq.conf, and I have disabled my prior radvd modifications. We'll see how stable it is today.

 

[owlyn]

There has been extensive discussions about this in the Comcast HSI forum on dslreports, as well as in Comcast's own forums.

What has been determined so far:

Netgear routers cannot maintain IPv6 for more than two days. A possible exception is the Netgear Nighthawk.

When I switched from a Netgear WNDR3400 to the ASUS RT-AC66, I was able to maintain IPv6 with no problem. This was all using an Arris modem.

After I switched to a Ubee modem, I am still maintaining IPv6 unless I reboot the modem. After the reboot, the ASUS still shows the IPv6 addresses, but they are really not there. After much experimentation, I found that the following procedure restores IPv6 on the ASUS:

1. Disable IPv6 on the Asus
2. Enable IPv6 on the Asus. No IPv6 address will show on the Asus
3. Disconnect the Ethernet wire from the Asus to the PC.
4. Connect the Ethernet wire from the modem directly to the PC, bypassing the router.
5. Open a browser and attempt to connect to any valid site. Wait a few seconds. You may not be able to connect- that is okay.
6. Close the browser
7. Reconnect the Ethernet wire from the modem back to the Router.
Reconnect the Ethernet wire from the Router to the PC.
8. Go to IPv6 page on the router. You should have the IPv^ address information.
9. Done. Test at test-ipv6.com/

Is this a Ubee issue, Comcast issue, Asus issue, Merlin issue, my own setup issue? Some combination of those? Who knows... But my procedure is repeatable.