PC Engines apu2 experiences

VAMike

The handwriting was on the wall for a while. I don't think they ever had the volume to compete with the various multi-port boxes coming out of china on the high end (which can be configured with much more powerful processors than could fit in the APU form factor) nor with stuff like the raspberry pi on the low end. Soekris ran into the same problems but threw in the towel earlier. The niche they filled was just getting too small.

Stewart

@dobby_ The APU2 can barely do gigabit. Not sure how it was expected to go higher.

Stewart

@vamike Did they do any marketing or outreach? The only place I know them from is that we used to purchase them through Netgate before they took over pfSense. When they stopped using them we tracked them down and began purchasing and using them on our own. For the last several years they've just been our go-to box dozens of times. I hate to move on from them.

VAMike

@stewart to whom? for what purpose? I really just don't think there's enough of a market that doesn't want either 1) cheaper, 2) smaller/lower wattage, or 3) more powerful. And there are existing players in each of those segments. We used to buy a good number of APUs as well, but for the past couple of years we've been going with faster higher-core intel boxes with more interfaces, m.2, and expandable RAM, because we can use the extra capacity for not much more money and not much of a larger device---we just didn't need the specific constraints of the APU form factor. On the flip side, small ARM boards can be found cheaper, smaller, and lower power than the APU. Sure, there are people for whom the APU line is a better fit than anything else, the question is whether there's enough of them. Scale is a thing, and the lower the volume the more expensive each part becomes until it's not cost competitive at all. There are probably disproportionately more of them here given the limited architecture options for pfsense, but I don't think you can build a sustainable business on the set of people who want to run pfsense but don't want to buy hardware from netgate.

Stewart

@vamike I understand all of that. But as a company, if they want to increase volume, what did they do? We are the market they are/were building for. They aren't in Amazon to see them in searches. I've never seen any advertisement for them. They didn't come into forums for outreach from what I've ever seen. How were they going to increase volume if nobody knew about them? From their statement it looks like they never received the vendor support to make something better, though, so they kept making variations of the same unit that's just kinda grown out of relevance.

VAMike

@stewart this wasn't the market, it's too small to support a company. their target was larger commercial/oem customers, who generally don't hang out in forums or buy stuff based on amazon ads. e.g., at one point netgate was a customer. they dabbled in small volume consumer sales, but it was never their focus.

kevindd992002

@dugeem are the tweaks in the link I provided before still applicable for 2.7?

https://teklager.se/en/knowledge-base/apu2-1-gigabit-throughput-pfsense/

stephenw10

The link suggests no tweaks are required in 2.5 or 2.6 and I would expect the same in 2.7. Though I don't have an APU2 to test with.

dugeem

Well it’s mid 2025 and Netgate have released updates for both pfSense CE (2.8) and pfSense Plus (25.07).

Just a quick update that for me the APU2 lives on and continues to benefit from Netgate improvements as well as upstream FreeBSD improvements.

My current tweaks (based on real performance gains):

Upgrade APU2 BIOS to enable CPB (mainline v4.9.0.2 or later - suggest v4.16 or later)
Add following sysctls to either /boot/loader.conf.local or /etc/sysctl.conf

dev.igb.0.iflib.tx_abdicate=1
dev.igb.1.iflib.tx_abdicate=1
dev.igb.2.iflib.tx_abdicate=1

(Refer to my previous post https://forum.netgate.com/post/1070610 for more info on this tweak. As previously noted a known issue with tx_abdicate is if IPSEC is in use - enabling tx_abdicate may result in lower IPSEC throughput. In this case leave it disabled (ie default)

If your network bandwidth is higher than 500Mb/s then under System / Advanced / System Tunables tab increase net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen to 2048. If you’re using IPv6 also add tuning for net.inet6.ip6.intr_queue_maxlen as well (suggest same 2048). These tunables increase the IP queue to eliminate drops (reference https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tune.html#ip-input-queue-intr-queue)

For me the APU2 continues to be a great ultra low power router with sufficient network performance for my 800Mb/s internet (DOCSIS HFC).

Enjoy!

bigsy

@dugeem It would be interesting to see how much PPPoE performance has improved with the new if_pppoe driver included in 2.8 CE and Plus 25.07.

Previously with Netgraph/mpd5 it was limited to ~ 400 Mbps on the APU2.