Zyxel NAS326 Installation Instruction

xanatos,

I don't reread posts in unless I try to find something. Did not realize there were more info when you updated.

> So the stock kernel seems to be much much faster
> (at least with btrfs).

I did not pay much attention to btrfs. So not sure what can be improved in the kernel or user space.

> Made some tests with Ext4. The Ext4 partition is
> at the end of the disk. The results with the stock
> kernel and with the latest kernel are much more
> similar:

> Stock firmware:

> 3040387403 bytes (2.8GB) copied, 24.732981
> seconds, 117.2MB/s

> real 0m 24.73s
> user 0m 0.08s
> sys 0m 3.38s

> Debian Kernel 6.2.8:

> 3040387403 bytes (3.0 GB, 2.8 GiB) copied, 24.3131
> s, 125 MB/s

> real 0m24.328s
> user 0m0.248s
> sys 0m6.969s

> The sys time doubles (that for a small CPU like
> the one in the NAS326 is important),

Usually I'd like to see the sys time larger in task like this. It just mean the modern Ext4 file system driver is different.

-bodhi
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Might not be the best place to post this, feel free to remove - just wanted to say I appreciate your hard work in keeping this hardware useful. You're the man.

-ds

ds,

Thanks for the feedback!

-bodhi
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No way to install debian on NAND?.

Maybe the hdd would be an alternative, but I'm worried about it not being able to sleep and spin down.

Any advice?.

Pachis,

> No way to install debian on NAND?.

This box NAND flash is too small for Debian rootfs.


> Maybe the hdd would be an alternative, but I'm
> worried about it not being able to sleep and spin
> down.

I would not worry about HDD not spinning down.


However, if you really want to keep the HDD sleeping most of the time, you can run the rootfs on USB. Take precaution such as backing up regularly, and move logs to /tmp to prolong the USB flash drive life.

-bodhi
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Thanks for your support bodhi.

Didn't take in account this is a full Debian, was thinking on OS like Openwrt whose space requirements are more reduced.

I just bought a small usb flash drive with good performance (Samsung FIT), planning to install rootfs on it. Original firmware lacks a lot of functionality nowadays... no VPN client/server, no Zerotier... only basic usage.

I have been struggling with SMB performance and other protocols. With stock firmware you get +- 90MB/s (gigabit limit more or less) and about 30% cpu usage, pretty good for a cheap NAS. With Debian and OMV6 you get 40MB/s at most with the CPU maxed out.

I tried to fine tuning SMB with all kind of parameteres, turning flow control off and so on, but couldn't pass 50MB/s with 90%CPU.

After investigating I noticed a thing that could be relevant and is that latest kernel lacks the cryptodev module (https://github.com/cryptodev-linux/cryptodev-linux), you can check that /dev/crypto is non existant in 6.3.8 kernel, but it exists in stock firmware kernel.

I can't assure that this issue has a direct impact in SMB performance, but I think is likely to occur. Anyway, missing cryptodev module will impact in SSL and AES encryption tasks (https, webdav, vpn, zerotier, ...), as hardware dedicated crypto engine from ARMADA 38x chip is not being used.

I tried to compile module by myself but my Linux skills are limited, it seems that kernel headers are missing and MAKE throws an error. Any advice?.

Pachis,

> After investigating I noticed a thing that could
> be relevant and is that latest kernel lacks the
> cryptodev module
> (https://github.com/cryptodev-linux/cryptodev-linux),
> you can check that /dev/crypto is non existant in
> 6.3.8 kernel, but it exists in stock firmware
> kernel.

This box has Armada 380 SoC, so no need to compile cryptodev. The driver used is armada-38x-crypto. Also the rootfs Debian-5.13.8-mvebu-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 is armhf. So you have all necessary parts regarding encryption tasks.

Samba performance is a different issue. This Wiki thread post about Samba tuning could be a bit old, but it's worth a try.

Quote

Perfornance Tuning & Benchmarks

Pogo ProV3 vs Pogo E02
Another Pogo Pro V3 benchmarks
Network performance - SAMBA - NFS (various protocols)
Pogo Pro V3 Network NFS benchmarks
Kirkwood vs OXNAS network performance (with flow control)
Kirkwood vs OXNAS network performance (flow control turned off )
OXNAS vs OXNAS network performance (flow control turned off)
Samba Tuning
Mount NTFS with big_writes
Increase NFSD max_block_size
Reduce NFSD threads

Note that Samba performance is also affected by the network and HDD performance. Network performance has been checked out to be optimal with this kernel. HDD performance is harder to tell in general, because each user's hardware configuration is different.

-bodhi
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Also, check your dmesg for armada-38x-crypto.

-bodhi
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> This box has Armada 380 SoC, so no need to compile
> cryptodev. The driver used is armada-38x-crypto.
> Also the rootfs
> Debian-5.13.8-mvebu-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2 is
> armhf. So you have all necessary parts regarding
> encryption tasks.

I might need to check one more thing regarding encryption tasks for this box. I forgot whether the crypto SRAM definitions are needed in the DTS for this NAS326 box.

-bodhi
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