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https://wiki.banana-pi.org/Banana_Pi_BPI-R4
https://forum.openwrt.org/t/so-you-have-500mbps-1gbps-fiber-...
The chip would need to be powerful enough to process packets to do advanced QoS (like SQM) at line-rate. However, offload is supported on MT chips, so you can still perform hardware NAT functions, just not as configurable as those other methods for traffic control.
Maybe some VPP integration into the proper distribution, instead of packages and custom compiles, would make that work.
https://github.com/k13132/openwrt-dpdk
> bananapi do a lot of boards but their software story has been a bit poor
This is quite common with other board manufacturers too. I'd rather suggest to ignore completely their cobbled together distros, often also tainted by proprietary modifications, that become unmaintained in a few years, and see if they're among the many supported by Armbian or DietPi.
https://www.armbian.com/download/
https://dietpi.com/#download
Running FOSS software on a switch is an awkward endeavor. Some switches have okay-to-decent support, mostly via OpenWRT, and you’re mostly getting VLAN control. With Ruckus or Cisco, etc, you also get ACLs, some “layer 3” capabilities, sFlow, SNMP, real support for various loop detection schemes, network mapping capabilities, possible diagnosis of cable problems, and lots more. And a configuration system that is quite a bit better than you will find in most Linux networking config software. (Although OpenWRT actually tries pretty well, in contrast to, say, Ubuntu. Sigh.)
I would not want to run a large network using OpenWRT switches. Maybe if OpenWRT took management of multiple devices seriously some day.
FWIW, in theory you can run a mostly-open Linux stack on some of the very software-defined switches, supporting OpenFlow and such. See, for example, https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC/wiki This did not seem like an easy thing to get working.