OpenBSD 6.9 Router Benchmarks

The memes.

Personally I ran on an Edgerouter for many years using the official VyOS/Vyatta fork, and it routes and firewalls close to gigabit with hardware acceleration, and uses less than 8W doing it. That’s 70 kWh / year, or €21/year. Not bad for a €89 device.

I upgraded to an ER4 to gain better VPN performance.

After a few years I upgraded again to a Netgate ARM device, the SG-3100, which on paper should be able to handle close to gigabit performance with suricata enabled. In reality I had frequent restarts due to the watchdog detecting an overloaded aystem.

The entire distribution is taken care of by a single team. Security is a higher priority than additional features. Documentation mistakes are considered bugs that need to be fixed. Minimal surprises.

I got deep into router implementations like we are talking about years ago, combining ipsec, gre, bgp, and qos, lots of end-points and queues. OpenBSD had more features and less bugs in this space than cisco routers at the time. I was very impressed.

Like so many other things, it may depend on what you're doing and what you are comfortable with.

The big advantage I see with OpenBSD is the simplicity.

Everything about it is simple. Where things are installed and how they are configured is far more consistent than Linux. The inbuilt man pages are fantastic compared to other systems. The fact it comes with nothing installed and you need to turn things on makes it easy to manage as you know exactly what is running, in turn this makes keeping up to date easier. Pf is fantastic and again simple.

From not knowing OpenBSD only using Linux before I had a home network with multiple VLANS, cross vlan routing, nat, dns filtering, dns over tls etc in very little time.

I’ll be honest the reason I switched to OpenBSD was mainly to play with something new. I previously had a home router running dd-wrt which was ok but clunky ui, hard to know what was running, upgrading was downloading random untrusted binaries off the internet for specific builds that work on my router. I decided this isn’t great so my options where play and build a OpenBSD router or try something like the EdgeRouter.

I am glad i went with OpenBSD, it doesn’t hide anything from you, you have absolute control and it’s simple to configure with a few static config files. You really understand what is happening.

On top of that, since setting it up, I’ve never touched it. No reboots, no going changing settings, it just works. It’s been set and forget.