I have a 1200 Mbps service and a modem which has 2x 1Gbps ethernet ports and supports 802.3ad/LACP to send/receive the full service bandwidth. Does bpi-r4 (in OpenWRT) support bonding 2x ethernet ports using LACP, hardware supported to achieve combined bandwidth > 1Gbps? Can’t seem to find this documented or described anywhere, but want to confirm before I pull the trigger on a bpi-r4.
Which ISP and what kind of technology do you use to get internet to your home?
Before you push the button, you should consider more than LACP… (just my opinion 
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Well naturally that’s not the only thing I’m considering! I’m just looking at bpi-r4 as a potential replacement for my current raspberry pi 4 openwrt router. No WiFi, just wired.
Not sure why it matters, but I have Comcast cable-based internet.
I was just curious! I thought you could may have fiber optics. And may use the SFP modul as a modem.
But cable internet in another construction site …
Oh, how I wish I had other options besides cable!
After some more digging around, it seems that the 4 gigabit ports are a “dumb switch” and probably can only used for cpu-driven bonding. I wonder what kind of throughput can be realized.
OK I thought I should update the community with my findings. Using current (24.10) OpenWRT, bonding does not work on BPI-R4 1Gbit ethernet ports. The bonding commands work, but when a lan1-4 port is part of a bond, the port will not show a link led, and cables are not detected.
Basically, does not work, at all. I ended up using my managed switches to bond 2x 1Gbit ethernet ports into a 2.5Gbit port on an isolated VLAN and use that between the cable modem and the BPI-R4’s 2.5Gbit port (I have 2.5Gbit version). It works great, and sustains speeds well above 1Gbit.
How about a BPI-R4 derivative with 3x SFP and toss the 1Gbit “switch”? 
Did you try other bonding modes? E.g., balance-xor with L3+L4 hashing is what a lot of NASes use. If you’re willing to do more troubleshooting, your could build OpenWrt with dynamic kernel debugging:
- Add
CONFIG_KERNEL_DYNAMIC_DEBUG=yto .config while building. - Run
echo "file drivers/net/* +p" > /sys/kernel/debug/dynamic_debug/controland check what errors pop up in dmesg.
Although, if an extra 10GbE is what you need, you could try an M.2 NIC like this one. In the BPI-R4 it will only have 8 Gbps bandwidth to work with, but still an upgrade over port bonding.
