GL.iNet Flint 2 router review – Part 2: WiFi 6, 2.5GbE, WireGuard performance

GL.iNet Flint 2 Review

In the first part of the review of the GL.iNet GL-MT6000 “Flint 2” WiFi 6 router, I had a look at the package content and the hardware design with a teardown of the router, and quickly tried it out. I’ve now had more time to play with the router focusing the review on WiFi 6 and 2.5GbE performance, and checking whether of 900 Mbps Wireguard VPN claim had any truth to it. The router also supports the Tor network to anonymously browse the web, Adguard Home to get rid of unwanted ads, and Repeater mode among other features. Those all work with the Fliont 2 router, but I won’t cover those in detail here, and invite you to check out the GL.iNet Brume 2 security gateway review for Tor and Adguard Home and the GL.iNet Beryl AX review for the repeater mode test. Connecting wired and wireless clients The Flint […]

OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY is an upcoming router board developed by OpenWrt and Banana Pi

OpenWrt One AP-24.XY

OpenWrt developers have started the process to develop the “OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY” router board based on MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) SoC and MediaTek MT7976C dual-band WiFi 6 chipset, and designed in collaboration with Banana Pi that will also handle manufacturing and distribution of the router board. As of the OpenWrt 23.05 release, close to 1,800 routers and other devices are officially supported by the lightweight embedded Linux operating system, and many more claim to be running OpenWrt through a fork of the OS. But none of those are made by OpenWrt developers who have now decided to create their own router board in collaboration with Banana Pi since they’ve done such boards including the BPI-R4 WiFi 7 router SBC. OpenWrt One/AP-24.XY preliminary specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7981B (Filogic 820) dual-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.3 GHz System Memory – 1GB DDR4 Storage 128 MB SPI NAND flash for U-boot and Linux 4 […]

Linux 6.7 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.7 release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.7, following Linux 6.6 LTS a little over two months ago: So we had a little bit more going on last week compared to the holiday week before that, but certainly not enough to make me think we’d want to delay this any further. End result: 6.7 is (in number of commits: over 17k non-merge commits, with 1k+ merges) one of the largest kernel releases we’ve ever had, but the extra rc8 week was purely due to timing with the holidays, not about any difficulties with the larger release. The main changes this last week were a few DRM updates (mainly fixes for new hw enablement in this version – both amd and nouveau), some more bcachefs fixes (and bcachefs is obviously new to 6.7 and one of the reasons for the large number of commits), and then a few random […]

Banana Pi BPI-R4 WiFi 7 router board is powered by a MediaTek Filogic 880 processor

Banana Pi R4

Banana Pi BPI-R4 is a WiFi 7 router board powered by the MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Corex-A73 processor with 4GB DDR4 RAM, 8GB eMMC flash, and 128MB SPI-NAND flash. The board also comes with two 10GbE SFP cages, four Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports, a USB 3.2 port, as well as an M.2 socket for a 4G/5G modem or an NVMe SSD, and two mini PCIe slots with PCIe 3.0 to support WiFi 7. Banana Pi BPI-R4 specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Corex-A73 processor @ 1.8GHz with AI-powered packet accelerator System Memory – 4GB DDR4 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, 128MB SPI NAND Flash, microSD card slot, M.2 Key M for NVMe SSD (see Expansion section for details) Networking 2x 10GbE SFP cages (option for 1x 10Gbe SFP cage and 1x 2.5Gbe PHY) 4x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports (1x WAN and 3x LAN) USB – […]

MediaTek Filogic 860 & Filogic 360 WiFi 7 chipsets target mainstream BE7200 routers and clients

MediaTek Filogic 860

MediaTek has unveiled two new WiFi 7 chipsets with the Filogic 860 tri-core Arm Cortex-A73 SoC designed for up to BE7200 mainstream routers and gateways and Filogic 360 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 chip for client devices such as smartphones, PCs, laptops, set-top boxes, OTT streaming boxes, etc… for up to 2.9 Gbps bandwidth. The new Filogic 860 and Filogic 360 chipsets provide more cost-effective alternatives to the Filogic 880 SoC for up to BE36000 routers and Filogic 380 clients chip capable of up to  6.5 Gbps PHY data rate, both of which were introduced in May 2022. MediaTek Filogic 860 Filogic 860 specifications: CPU – 3x Arm Cortex-A73 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz Network Processing Unit (NPU) – Hardware QoS acceleration and Tunneling Offload Engine for VLAN / PPTP / L2TP / GRE Networking Crypto engine (EIP-197) – For IPv4 NATP / IPv6 / DS-Lite / 6RD […]

Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.6 release

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]

OpenWrt 23.05 released with MbedTLS by default, Rust packages, over 1,790 supported devices

OpenWrt 23.05

OpenWrt 23.05 open-source Linux operating system for routers and resource-constrained headless embedded systems has just been released with over 4300 commits since the release of OpenWrt 22.03 a little over a year ago. The new release now supports over 1790 devices or about over 200 new devices compared to the OpenWrt 22.03 release with notable new targets including the ipq807x target for the Qualcomm IPQ807x WiFi 6 SoCs, the mediatek/filogic subtarget for the Mediatek Filogic 830 and 630 SoCs, and the sifiveu target for the HiFive Unleashed and Unmatched RISC-V development boards. OpenWrt 23.05 switches from wolfSSL to MbedTLS as default because the latter has a much smaller footprint and offers a more stable ABI (application binary interface) and LTS releases, but it does lack support for TLS 1.3, so users who need the latter may still switch to wolfSSL if needed. Another highlight of the new OpenWrt release is […]

GL.iNet Flint2 AX6000 router supports up to 900 Mbps WireGuard VPN with MediaTek MT7986 SoC

Flint2 router

GL.iNet Flint2 (also known as GL-MT6000) is a new AX6000 router based on MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) Arm SoC and supporting VPN speeds of up to 900 Mbps using WireGuard and 190 Mbps with OpenVPN. This caught my attention, as I previously covered other GL.iNet routers such as the Spitz AX (GL-X3000NR) and the Beryl AX (GL-MT3000) based on the previously generation Filogic 820 (MT7981B) CPU with claims of (only) 300 Mbps transfer rates with Wireguard, so the new model is supposed to triple the VPN performance. GL.iNet Flint2 (GL-MT6000) specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) quad-core Arm Cortex A53 processor @ 2.0 GHz with hardware acceleration engines for Wi-Fi offloading and networking System Memory – 1GB DDR4 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash Networking 2x 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports 4x Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports 802.11b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6 with 4x external Wi-Fi antennas Up to 1,148 Mbps @ 2.4 GHz […]

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