Omnia on steroids project - your opinion and expertise is welcomed

Omnia hardware Omnia HW tweaks
1

Hi,
I would like to do for my Master Thesis a project with Turris Omnia. Basicly I would like to take Omnia 2GB pimp it out.

1} I would put https://www.compex.com.sg/product/wle1216v5-20/ and https://www.compex.com.sg/product/wle1216v2-20/ inside. Of course I would have to either add 2 antennas (there is space for it) or somehow create/get diplexer so I use only 4 antennas (more elegant solution). Driver should be here https://github.com/kvalo/ath10k-firmware/tree/master/QCA9984/hw1.0. As far as I know there are no 802.11ad or ax cards so far. Idea here is to get the fastest WI-Fi.

2} I would get NAS box and I would add a SATA adapter to get 4 SATA ports. I found https://www.innodisk.com/en/products/embedded-peripheral/storage-expansion/EMPS-3401#tab3 or http://www.iocrest.com/en/product_details564_a.html. Regular card has just 2 ports for 2 disks and I thought about RAID 5 and then after reading some articles which don’t recommend it I came up with RAID01 with https://www.startech.com/HDD/Adapters/sata-adapter-enclosure~35SAT225S3R which has hardware RAID0 so I would use 2 of those, 4 2TB 2.5 HDDs https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179110 (the largest possible because of 9.5 mm limit) and created RAID 1 in Omnia. Idea here is to get fastest NAS with redundancy. Maybe there is better solution, maybe simple RAID 1 of two 3.5 will do the same, Also maybe SFP could be used with my PC 10G card for higher throughput (2.5). Maybe https://www.crowdsupply.com/gnubee/personal-cloud-2 would be way better solution. I am not really sure about it, if this will work, please share your opinion, your ideas.

  1. I would add TBS5580 https://www.tbsiptv.com/download/tbs5580/tbs5580_multi_standard_tuner_usb_box_ci.pdf tuner so it is possible to watch TV over network. Drivers should be here https://github.com/tbsdtv/linux_media/wiki.

  2. We have 1 USB 3.0 left and I would use it for webcam. Logitech BRIO STREAM has bad Linux support so I would probably choose C922, http://www.kurokesu.com/shop/cameras/CAMUSB1 or C920 with http://www.kurokesu.com/shop/diy_kits/KITC920 . Would you use any better camera. Or do you have better idea what to do with this USB?

  3. I also have a 3D printer Anet A8. Many users use Raspberry Pi 3 with it to print with Octoprint. Do you think it would be beneficial to use Omnia for it?

  4. Services: Web Server, OpenVPN server, FTP, MiniDLNA, SAMBA. Anything else?

  5. Tinkering: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1959971 and https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2150046

  6. I also have regular Turris 1.1. How could those 2 be used together?

I know it is many questions but one cannot know everything. I am asking for a little help because I explained my idea to a professor and he is interested in it, so before I finish my proposal for Master Thesis I would like to hear some criticism.

Thank you.

P.S.: Of course I would make all the work public and available for others because I would like to give back to the community.

2

where is ambitious hobbyist project going for master thesis?

4 Likes
3

  1. That card has one of my colleagues on table but I don’t think so that he had time to play with it. And about what article are you talking about? I think that you are talking about problems with raid5 on btrfs. But you don’t have to be using btrfs at all (or raid5 was declared as stable in Linux 4.12 I think and it’s most probable that those patches will be backported by opensuse and included by us).
    On matter of SFP, no it won’t help unless your computer is kilometres away. SFP is limited by onboard speed (cpu ethernet) which is 1G.

  2. I would expect little bit better performance but because I expect that those people are not slicing on rpi3 I would say that there will be little to no change.

  3. Yes in various use cases but it really depends on what is your idea of you work.

If you go trough this then we would be happy to accept any patches you create so hardware you will use can be used by anyone.

Well I would also like to see where your master thesis lies. What exactly is your idea? I am not sure if pump omnia up is valid master thesis. I don’t know what you specialization is but I think that you are planning to wide and too shallow. I think that something like comparing few wifi cards with different antennas, with and without diplexers might be interesting. Same thing with sata cards maybe (maybe even using multiple cards on single board). Unless of course you have an idea or use case you are trying to fit omnia in but that doesn’t seems to be the case.

1 Like
4

Thank you for suggestions.

It might seem that I go too wide and too shallow but it was an idea, to use as much stuff with Omnia to show what can be done with such a hardware and also test the quality. Maybe you are right but so far the professor is fine with it, maybe he will tell me to focus on something we will see. Anyway the point of my post was to find out if this configuration could work.

2} I was talking about this article: http://www.zdnet.com/article/raidfail-dont-use-raid-5-on-small-arrays/. If it is true that SFP is limited to 1Gb then here https://www.turris.cz/doc/_media/omnia/to-datasheet.pdf is a mistake. This and the statement “Support 2.5G over SGMII” on Marvell website made me think it is 2.5Gb.

5

If you wanted faster network above all else, you could put a 10g card in. It would be bottlenecked by PCIe (iirc it’s pcie 2.0 so 4 gbits after encoding, minus overhead) but that would still be far faster than gigabit if the SFP speed is indeed limited to 1gb. Not sure what you would do for SATA though.

6

Well no. Then it’s my mistake. I am just some software guy and I thought that we had some limitation on board. But if hardware guys tells in datasheet 2.5 then yes it’s 2.5 capable. Sorry for misleading you.

Those arguments seems reasonable so yes no raid5 on 4 drives bays.

Yes but what I miss is some idea on technical result. Yes it’s definitely interesting to see what you can do with TO but I think that such assignment can result to only two conclusions, either we managed to do it or we didn’t because… Interestingly enough the second one (less nice for us) is more juicy as that can lead to some interesting results (like locating bottle necks in design) but in reality I am afraid that it still misses some technical premiss. I think that you should have some technical well defined theory you want to test with this (other option is of course that your professor needs such device for his use case).

7

That is interesting idea. I guess you have something like https://www.aliexpress.com/item/MSATA-Mini-PCIe-Half-mPCIe-WiFi-WAN-To-PCIe-4x-PCI-E-Riser-x4-adapter-Card/32833715321.html in mind and then to put regurar 4x 10G card in. that would mean:

  1. Just 1 Omnia with 5Ghz Wifi card, SATA card and 10G card through adapter connected to switch
  2. 2 Omnias configuration:
    1st - 5Ghz Wifi card, SATA card and 10G card through adapter connected to switch
    2nd - 2.4Ghz Wifi card, LTE modem, 10G card through adapter connected to switch
    or
    1st - 2*SATA card and 10G card through adapter connected to switch
    2nd - 2.4Ghz Wifi card, 5Ghz Wifi card, 10G card through adapter connected to switch

Depends if RAID can be done over 2 SATA adapters and if using 2 adapters would bring more performance if SSDs were used.

I think this would narrow it down so I would focus on getting the fastest configuration out of Omnia and I would not include the tuner, webcam, 3d printer…

8

I sketched the thing: https://imgur.com/a/lNlmb

Sorry, I am no Botticelli more of a Picasso :smiley: