R8000 / hardware acceleration

[bodean]

Ive read that stock fw does not support hardware acceleration. However, if I were to put Kong or Tomato Tomato Shibby on, it supports hardware acceleration and simple bandwidth limiting.

Ive also read that one will never reach Gbps speeds with DD-WRT as it doesn't have HW accel. Tomato offers a working CTF on ARM routers. Is there any truth to this, and is HW acceleration that important?

 

[microchip]

stock fw very well supports HW acceleration. Who told you it doesn't? The thing about HW accel is that it gets disabled if you use some feature as it's not compatible with them. Any feature that must inspect packets first disables HW accel. Tomato is the only open source firmware for the R8000 that supports HW accel (CTF).

HW accel is mostly for if you have a line at or above 300 Mbps

 

[bodean]

Im pretty much using the default settings in the latest netgear fw. So not sure if things disable it or not.
As for Tomato, is that a selling point to using it, that it supports HW accel (CTF) where other open source do not?

 

[microchip]

Selling point is whatever does the job for you. Some prefer DDWRT others Tomato

 

[netwrks]

Ive read that stock fw does not support hardware acceleration. However, if I were to put Kong or Tomato Tomato Shibby on, it supports hardware acceleration and simple bandwidth limiting.

Ive also read that one will never reach Gbps speeds with DD-WRT as it doesn't have HW accel. Tomato offers a working CTF on ARM routers. Is there any truth to this, and is HW acceleration that important?

Depends how fast your ISP Service is.. If you have a Gig Service, HW acceleration is important..

 

[bodean]

If you have a Gig Service, HW acceleration is important..

So the stock FW, and Tomato both have HW acceleration, DD-WRT does not?

 

[bodean]

HW accel is that it gets disabled if you use some feature as it's not compatible with them.

Any idea what features these would be?

 

[microchip]

Any idea what features these would be?

any feature that needs to inspect packets, like QoS and IP monitoring

 

[bodean]

any feature that needs to inspect packets, like QoS and IP monitoring

Thanks for your help. If I may ask, what makes you prefer tomato over stock FW? Just curious

 

[microchip]

Thanks for your help. If I may ask, what makes you prefer tomato over stock FW? Just curious

- Has a lot of options
- Cleaner interface (at least if you use themes)
- Supports bandwidth limiting for Guest networks
- CTF support
- AdBlock on router level
- Easy set up of VLANs through the GUI
- Has a flexible logging system you can configure. I mainly use it to see what my guests are visiting, which sites etc
- Supports custom scripts

The above is all I need. Tomato also doesn't drain my Galaxy J5's battery like XWRT and recent stock FW

 

[bodean]

Is there any truth to Tomato FW having a weaker 5GHz signal than stock firmware?
Out of your list, CTF would be the thing that I would benefit from.

 

[microchip]

I can't say since I have no 5GHz devices at home and I don't use that band yet, but 2.4 is just as good as stock fw

note that by default, CTF is disabled. You need to enable it in Advanced -> Miscellaneous

 

[Roy2001]

I have use R8000 for almost 2 years. It is a great router, but I had trouble with it. Stock FW works fine if I don't plug in HDD, it would stuck if I do so. Kong build DD-WRT gives good performance but would reboot from every few hours to once a day. Shibby Tomato has very weak wifi signal strength.

So I just bought a Tmobile AC1900 and flashed it back to AC68U.