RouterPi – CM4 High-Performance Router Board
Another Raspberry Pi Router! I’ve always wanted to use a Raspberry Pi as my home internet router, but previous versions didn’t quite meet my requirements. I needed two Ethernet interfaces that could handle 1Gb traffic with low latency. The Pi 2 had 100Mb Ethernet, and the Pi 3 had 1Gb Ethernet, but it was shared on the USB 2.0 bus, limiting it to a few hundred Mbps. There were other Pi-like products, but their software and long-term support didn’t look promising. So, for the past decade, I’ve been using a small fanless Intel N3050 mini-ITX system with a Gigabyte N3050N-D3H motherboard, which had dual onboard Ethernet and could run Debian Linux on a USB stick.
Then came the Pi 4, which had its own bus and 1Gb Ethernet on USB 3.0! However, I was still unhappy about the CPU overhead and power consumption increase from having to connect the second Ethernet interface to a USB 3.0 hub. This was the main reason I created a PCIe bridge “chip” to add a PCIe network card. But a few months later, the Compute Module 4 was released, and now there’s the RouterPi board: an optimized re-write.
Hardware
- Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with 2GB RAM & 8GB eMMC
- 2x