GL.iNet GL-MT6000 “Flint 2” WiFi 6 router review – Part 1: Unboxing, teardown, and first try

GL.iNet GL-MT6000 review

GL.iNet Flint 2 (also known as GL-MT6000) is a new WiFi 6 AX6000 router based on MediaTek MT7986 (Filogic 830) Arm SoC running of fork OpenWrt 23.05 and claims up of up tup to 900 Mbps VPN speed using WireGuard. The company sent us a review sample of the Flint 2 router, and since we’ve already listed the specifications, we’ll focus the first part of the review on an unboxing, teardown, and a first quick try, before testing some of the features, including the VPN speed, and comparing it to the Xiaomi Mi AX6000 router I own in the second part of the review in a few weeks. GL.iNet GL-MT6000 unboxing The package shows the model number Flint 2 / GL-MT6000 and key features such as the AX6000 WiFi 6, dual 2.5GbE, multi-WAN support, dual Ethernet WAN, OpenWrt, and VPN. The package features the router itself with its four antennas, […]

iKOOLCORE R2 (Core i3-N300) system review – Part2: Proxmox VE, Ubuntu 22.04, pfSense

iKOOLCORE R2 Ubuntu Promox VE dual display

In the first part of iKOOLCORE R2 mini PC & router review, I had a look at the hardware with an unboxing and a teardown of the Intel Core i3-N300 Alder Lake-N computer and also noticed the device booted to a UEFI shell. So for the second part of the review, I will report my experience installing Proxmox VE on the iKOOLCORE R2 and setting up and using Ubuntu 22.04, pfSense 2.7.2, and OpenWrt 23.05 virtual machines, making sure I can still use a physical display, keyboard, and mouse with Ubuntu while pfSense firewall is running. As a side note, the previous generation iKOOLCORE R1 mini PC that was sent to Ian for review with Proxmox VE and various virtual machines preinstalled OpenWrt, Debian 11, and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC set to Chinese language by default. As I understand it, iKOOLCORE still does that for the Chinese market, but not […]

Banana Pi BPI-R4 WiFi 7 router board is powered by a MediaTek Filogic 880 processor

Banana Pi R4

Banana Pi BPI-R4 is a WiFi 7 router board powered by the MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Corex-A73 processor with 4GB DDR4 RAM, 8GB eMMC flash, and 128MB SPI-NAND flash. The board also comes with two 10GbE SFP cages, four Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports, a USB 3.2 port, as well as an M.2 socket for a 4G/5G modem or an NVMe SSD, and two mini PCIe slots with PCIe 3.0 to support WiFi 7. Banana Pi BPI-R4 specifications: SoC – MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Corex-A73 processor @ 1.8GHz with AI-powered packet accelerator System Memory – 4GB DDR4 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, 128MB SPI NAND Flash, microSD card slot, M.2 Key M for NVMe SSD (see Expansion section for details) Networking 2x 10GbE SFP cages (option for 1x 10Gbe SFP cage and 1x 2.5Gbe PHY) 4x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports (1x WAN and 3x LAN) USB – […]

iKOOLCORE R2 mini PC and router review – Part 1: Specs, unboxing, teardown, and first boot

Four 2.5GbE Mini PC Firewall Gateway

iKOOLCORE R2 is an Intel Alder-Lake-N mini PC and network appliance (router/firewall/gateway) that comes with four 2.5GbE ports, up to 16GB RAM, NVMe storage, and the usual HDMI and USB ports, and offered with either Processor N95 or Core i3-N305 SoC. It’s the successor of the iKOOLCORE R1 with four gigabit Ethernet ports and Intel Celeron N5095 or Jasper Lake processor, and the company sent us a sample for testing, so we’ll start with listing the specifications, check out the mini PC and accessories with an unboxing, teardown the multilayer mini PC to check out the hardware design and explain how to update the SSD or install a wireless module, and check whether it can still boot to Windows 11 (default, preinstalled OS) after my adventurous teardown… iKOOCORE R2 specifications Alder Lake-N SoC Intel Processor N95 quad-core processor @ up to 3.4 GHz (Turbo) with 6MB cache, 24EU Intel UHD […]

MediaTek Filogic 860 & Filogic 360 WiFi 7 chipsets target mainstream BE7200 routers and clients

MediaTek Filogic 860

MediaTek has unveiled two new WiFi 7 chipsets with the Filogic 860 tri-core Arm Cortex-A73 SoC designed for up to BE7200 mainstream routers and gateways and Filogic 360 WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 chip for client devices such as smartphones, PCs, laptops, set-top boxes, OTT streaming boxes, etc… for up to 2.9 Gbps bandwidth. The new Filogic 860 and Filogic 360 chipsets provide more cost-effective alternatives to the Filogic 880 SoC for up to BE36000 routers and Filogic 380 clients chip capable of up to  6.5 Gbps PHY data rate, both of which were introduced in May 2022. MediaTek Filogic 860 Filogic 860 specifications: CPU – 3x Arm Cortex-A73 cores clocked at up to 1.8 GHz Network Processing Unit (NPU) – Hardware QoS acceleration and Tunneling Offload Engine for VLAN / PPTP / L2TP / GRE Networking Crypto engine (EIP-197) – For IPv4 NATP / IPv6 / DS-Lite / 6RD […]

International Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 deals and coupon codes

Alixexpress Black Friday 2023

We’ve been writing about international Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and coupon codes since 2014, as US-centric promotions such as Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are not always available to the international audience of CNX Software. So once again, we’ve searched at Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 international promotions and discount codes from specific manufacturers as well as popular online stores such as Aliexpress, Banggood, and others. Aliexpress Black Friday and Cyber Monday event Aliexpress will have a Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) event in 2023, but we have limited details at this time since it will only start on November 23, contrary to some of the other deals we’ll feature below which are already up and running. But the event will have two periods: Nov 20-22 PT – Warm Up event where users can find and add items to the cart before purchasing during the […]

Giveaway Week 2023 – GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border Router devkit

Getting Started GL-S200 Thread Border Router

It’s already day 4 of CNX Software Giveaway Week 2023 and today, we’ll be giving away GL.iNet GL-S200 Thread Border router kit that also includes three USB or battery-powered Thread development boards to experiment with various Thread topologies. The GL-S200 router comes with a Qualcomm QCA9531 MIPS router processor running a fork of OpenWrt and provides two Fast Ethernet WAN/LAN ports, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 4 802.11b/g/n up to 150 Mbps, and support for Thread (via an 802.15.4 radio) and Bluetooth 5.0. The development boards are based on the Nordic Semi nRF52840 microcontroller and each features a potentiometer+button, a PIR sensor, and two RGB LEDs. I reviewed the GL-S200 Thread Border router kit using the router’s dashboard interface and demo firmware provided for the three development boards. This enabled me to test star topology and mesh networking, and play around with demo scripts and code samples to display sensor and potentiometer […]

Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.6 release

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]

EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case