> The comments on that Banana Pi board point that the SoC doesn't have any network specific features i.e. HW NAT, WiFi offloading and so it would be bad for a router.
Does this really matter? It only has 1Gbps Ethernet, so shouldnt software NAT be fine? I have a significantly less powerful router with no hardware acceleration, and its never been an issue to get maximum speed, though my connection is only 100Mbit (over-provisioned to be about 20% faster).
I've seen the lack of HW NAT impacting performance of Wireless Network over Wired on some aftermarket firmwares for routers, OpenWrt does a decent job of software offloading but as with any SW acceleration the price is paid by the CPU.
Even with OpenWrt there are forks which can make use of HW NAT and give proprietary firmware level performance but are closed source!
Does this really matter? It only has 1Gbps Ethernet, so shouldnt software NAT be fine? I have a significantly less powerful router with no hardware acceleration, and its never been an issue to get maximum speed, though my connection is only 100Mbit (over-provisioned to be about 20% faster).