I’m worried I’m saturating the USB 2.0 bus on a Pi Zero 2W and am looking for opinion on this from the community.
My objective is ultimately to build a kind of personal mobile gateway – I wanted to use a Pi Zero 2W with a USB 2.0 Wifi adaptor as the upstream link connecting to a public wifi APs, hospital patient wifi, etc. At the same time it uses the Pi’s onboard 2.4g internal NIC as an AP for local devices. The main intention is to improve safety and control of my devices (tablets, laptops, etc.) with better gateway security or perhaps even a even a VPN when using these public AP gateways.
The Pi would also perform additional tasks such as download-mule work (e.g. using Aria2 to perform downloads on behalf of client browsers or even scripting yt-dlp to download videos and channels from other sources to the onboard SD card, probably then shared locally via SAMBA).
While I’m very much a novice here, guidance online pointed to using Network Manager and scripting NMCLI to establish the local AP and log into the upstream WIFI network. I did get this working however client performance of devices connected to its AP ere woeful. During testing I used a different terminal session and a connected screen/keyboard to monitor CPU and memory load (using bpytop) and all is well within limits there, CPU was barely doing anything; but I think I’m overloading the USB2 hub with the two WIFI Nics saturating it.
I get that these are both USB 2.0 devices sharing the same hub but I really thought this wouldn’t saturate the chain this easily. I connected an android tablet and just basic web browsing, youtube browsing, etc. was awful. I saw bpytop showing sharp spikes in NIC activity but CPU and memory remained consistently low.
To confirm it wasn’t the tablet disconnecting from the Pi’s AP and back to the main (parent) Wifi AP returned everything to normal for the tablet so the issue seems to be networking on the Pi.
Before I delve too deep – is this just a platform limitation I can’t overcome with my throughput expectations? I note there are other peer devices in this market now such as the Radxa Zero 3W which sports USB 3 to an extent (https://youtu.be/BaH4BBij5N4), is a USB-3 device like this a necessary path?
Or is there a software and configuration path I haven’t explored yet that I should know about? My configuration was quite rudimentary – set up the AP and configure the other as the upstream client, basically to get it going but not tweaking or buffering, etc. Is there more I need to do or explore? I can test some of the limits by using a Pi 4b however I don’t have any USB 3 NICs available.
My objective is ultimately to build a kind of personal mobile gateway – I wanted to use a Pi Zero 2W with a USB 2.0 Wifi adaptor as the upstream link connecting to a public wifi APs, hospital patient wifi, etc. At the same time it uses the Pi’s onboard 2.4g internal NIC as an AP for local devices. The main intention is to improve safety and control of my devices (tablets, laptops, etc.) with better gateway security or perhaps even a even a VPN when using these public AP gateways.
The Pi would also perform additional tasks such as download-mule work (e.g. using Aria2 to perform downloads on behalf of client browsers or even scripting yt-dlp to download videos and channels from other sources to the onboard SD card, probably then shared locally via SAMBA).
While I’m very much a novice here, guidance online pointed to using Network Manager and scripting NMCLI to establish the local AP and log into the upstream WIFI network. I did get this working however client performance of devices connected to its AP ere woeful. During testing I used a different terminal session and a connected screen/keyboard to monitor CPU and memory load (using bpytop) and all is well within limits there, CPU was barely doing anything; but I think I’m overloading the USB2 hub with the two WIFI Nics saturating it.
I get that these are both USB 2.0 devices sharing the same hub but I really thought this wouldn’t saturate the chain this easily. I connected an android tablet and just basic web browsing, youtube browsing, etc. was awful. I saw bpytop showing sharp spikes in NIC activity but CPU and memory remained consistently low.
To confirm it wasn’t the tablet disconnecting from the Pi’s AP and back to the main (parent) Wifi AP returned everything to normal for the tablet so the issue seems to be networking on the Pi.
Before I delve too deep – is this just a platform limitation I can’t overcome with my throughput expectations? I note there are other peer devices in this market now such as the Radxa Zero 3W which sports USB 3 to an extent (https://youtu.be/BaH4BBij5N4), is a USB-3 device like this a necessary path?
Or is there a software and configuration path I haven’t explored yet that I should know about? My configuration was quite rudimentary – set up the AP and configure the other as the upstream client, basically to get it going but not tweaking or buffering, etc. Is there more I need to do or explore? I can test some of the limits by using a Pi 4b however I don’t have any USB 3 NICs available.
Statistics: Posted by davo-cc — Tue Jan 30, 2024 9:06 am — Replies 0 — Views 60