Having over 15 gateways in the field and having written and released a packet forwarder I am aware of the (low) load it imposes on the CPU. However for forwarders not using the ancient UDP protocol the memory footprint is relatively large for the mostly limited amount of memory in the average openwrt device. So the basic router functions and wireless (WiFi and 3G) backhaul won’t be a problem but something like SDN might well be something that tips the scales the wrong way.
I assume you’ve based your hardware on something with a decent amount of ram and flash and not the 16 MB flash the LG308 has. For that device with the stock firmware that’s sufficient flash but It is not a lot when you want to add functionality. At least not for the average programmer these days, they’re used to gigabytes not megabytes.
(I happily use controllers with a couple of KB. I started programming on a CBM3008 with a whopping 8K ram and tapes for permanent storage and a ZX81 where the 1 KB of ram was shared between the program and display memory)
In the context that the OP was hoping to run some massive piece of virtual network switching software designed to route packets between virtual machines, I too would expect the gateway to suffer.
Are you familiar with the Monty Python Four Yorkshire Men sketch? 1024 bytes, luxury, when I were a lad, punched cards to program & magnetic core memory …
Still have my Uni stack of FORTRAN punched cards in the loft! (Really should have a clear out ) Also still have old Nascom, acquired as pre-uni apprentice, that came as a kit of components…bare pcb up…that supported 1-8K of (IIRC) 2708 UVEPROM & 1k Static RAM. Started building Friday evening finished > 2,000 solder joints and next to no sleep later on Sunday a.m. and powered up 1st time ( might be only time have ever managed that ) then off to pub for pint to celebrate for lunch! … and you try telling the youth of today, they never believe you… now where did I put my knotted hanky?.. (M.P. Ref = )
You made me actually check. My current OpenWrt image with all sorts of fun stuff, and actually using python as an intermediary to turn the UDP into MQTT-over-ssl, tips the scales at just over 8 megabytes.
For me, that’s huge. I’m more used to OpenWrt coming out in the 5 megabyte range.
But even in a 16 megabyte NOR flash that leaves ample room for U-Boot and even to add a fallback compact Linux image for issue recovery.
Other people (eg, the gateway manufacturers) go so far as to run an installation of Chirpstack on these platforms - which means not just the LoRaWAN network server, but postgres and redis to support it, too.
Is it allowed to ask what advantage you see for running openvswitch on a simple LoraWAN Gateway? For now i see only a overcomplication, waste of ressources and multiple additional points of possible failure…
I’d missed some of the possible nuance of that, though perhaps because the goal is less than clear.
So what I’d say is:
Running other sorts of “box in the field” things of the sort that people are already making OpenWrt do can be reasonable - one certainly needs to watch image size, network, usage, and beware anything that could cause the system overall to pause, but in general terms a gateway can juggle other tasks within reason.
VPN solutions are things people commonly put on gateways not really to protect their traffic, but to give a path in for remote administration: as such they’re one of maybe three classes of solution: virtual network actually allowing inbound connection, SSH outbound connection with a port forward back in, and task-based daemons that poll a dispatch server for specific commands and run them. There are probably other ideas, too. Both VPN and SSH tunnel solutions are commonly deployed on OpenWrt gateways.
In terms of a gateway participating in some cloud packet interchange scheme, it’s good to remember that gateways tend to be far less physically secure than cloud machines, and are out on the big bad Internet rather than on data center’s private and peering interconnect. What all of that means is that a gateway should probably interact with your cloud only through a narrow and guarded door. It’s from the ingest server that you then start routing things on whatever fun internal scheme you want to use, to servers inside the fence which aren’t even routable from the Internet. Think of gateways a lot like web browsers as being largely external to data infrastructure. And just as with field-deployed IoT devices in general, any client trust tokens or keys you have in gateways should be unique to that box, not common across all of your system or fleet of ownership, such that if someone steals one gateway and starts abusing its keys, you can just cut invalidate that gateway’s keys server side and cut it off while everything else keeps running.
Synchronicity??
I just ordered it a couple of days ago and today it is on the way to arrive. I am quite impressed with the overall value of rak7258 as advertised, and really glad to hear your feedback. Can’t wait to do all the openwrt fun with lorawan.
What’s the max range have you tried with this?
Which version of openwrt does it come with?
Enough already - almost all the gateways in the world use the same Semtech design & chip set so it’s down to you to give it a decent antenna in a good location for your range question. The antenna it comes with will be fine for indoor use but if you are hoping for 10’s of km, you’ll need to sort out an external one.
And, to be blunt, no one cares what version of OpenWRT it comes with because we don’t buy them to play with OpenWRT, we buy them to be a gateway. RAK do a good job of shipping a variety of gateways using different OS’s but they haven’t said which OpenWRT is on the box, principally as it will depend on where in the pile yours was when it was built and which warehouse it has been sitting in and for how long.
The datasheet doesn’t mention the version, I can’t see any information on how to rebuild OpenWRT for it nor do they provide the additional files to allow you to do that but they do update the firmware frequently. At worst, you do a rebuild and then use a packet forwarder at the command line.
This is not only unhelpful but also factually false.
The reality is that all of RAK’s OpenWrt gateways ship with 15.05
This is because they all use the MT7628, for which Mediatek abandoned support several years ago. No new versions with a Mediatek WiFi driver will ever exist. There are efforts to make newer versions with a non-Mediatek driver but RAK isn’t following those. Vendor support of the MT7628 both starts and ends with the single 15.05 OpenWrt release.
And one should care. The SoC is a decent tool for the job, but the fact that it can only run a rather old 3.18.45 kernel (it’s the kernel version to which the WiFi driver is locked) is something a buyer should be aware of. In theory, you can try the non-Mediatek supported releases, you may be able to get this to work by forward porting RAK’s handful of changes, who knows - WiFi isn’t all that important to a field deployed gateway, though it can be handy at earlier stages.
A rather unfocused assertion I feel. I definitely can’t find any RAK published information on which version of OpenWRT these gateways come with and I receive product directly from RAK with varying levels of firmware due to which warehouse, when it was made etc etc. And I definitely can’t find build instructions.
I can find third party reports, but they age.
I appreciate that my opening statement was rather broad & assumptive. Perhaps that’s the bit that is factually false?
As they haven’t released information on which version of OpenWRT they use, and the products that arrive here come with varying levels of firmware, I think I made a reasonable assumption.
Your inside knowledge is useful, but somewhat bluntly delivered.
I am developing dusun’s DSGW-090B loRaWAN gateway with OpenWRT system. You can ask them for the SDK and develop your application on the gateway. Currently their gateway’s OpenWRT version is 19.03, they are upgrading to the latest 22.03 version, and they upgrade the gateway’s system firmware quarterly. you can check the website: The Things Network Gateway - dusuniot
Hopes it will helps you.
) Also still have old Nascom, acquired as pre-uni apprentice, that came as a kit of components…bare pcb up…that supported 1-8K of (IIRC) 2708 UVEPROM & 1k Static RAM. Started building Friday evening finished > 2,000 solder joints and next to no sleep later on Sunday a.m. and powered up 1st time (
might be only time have ever managed that 
) then off to pub for pint to celebrate for lunch! … and you try telling the youth of today, they never believe you… now where did I put my knotted hanky?.. (M.P. Ref = 
)