Posted: Fri Apr 30, 2021 22:40 Post subject: What is disabling Shortcut Forwarding Engine on my R9000?
My Netgear R9000 LAN/WAN performance has been worse than I expected (typically 350 to 500 Mbit/s from a wired test client across a 1.2Gbps provisioned cable connection) and I started investigating why. Despite having Shortcut Forwarding Engine (SFE) set to Enable on the 'Setup/Basic Setup' tab, I found it wasn't actually working. When I ran lsmod, no 'fast_classifier' kernel module was loaded.
When I look at the output of 'nvram get sfe', it returns 1.
In my setup, I have three bridged networks:
1) the default bridge that comes with the normal FW
2) a second bridge that is bound to it's own WLAN1.1 (2.4Ghz) virtual AP for a segmented off guest network
3) a third bridge that is bound to it's own WLAN1.2 (2.4Ghz) virtual AP for a segmented off IoT device network
I also have QoS (HFSC/CAKE) enabled, to ensure that not all of my extremely limited 35Mbit/s upload bandwidth is occupied by certain upload-hungry clients.
If I manually 'modprobe fast_classifier', the SFE kernel module is loaded successfully and my LAN/WAN performance goes up to 650-750Mbit/s from the same wired test client.
A few questions:
1) What decides whether the 'fast_classifier' kernel module is loaded or not...what are the gates? I read somewhere that un-bridged connections cause this but I don't think I have any?
2) What problem will I cause by loading the module manually? The other networks still seem to be working and properly segmented.