LEDE/OpenWRT on a PC Engines APU2(c4)

The PC Engines APU2 is a fanless

• 1 Ghz quad-core AMD GX-412TC x64 Jaguar SoC
• 4 GB DDR3-1333 ECC DRAM
• 3 Intel i210AT ethernet ports
• mSATA slot
• 2 mini-pcie slots, one attached to a SIM card holder for GSM modems

All in all, a pretty decent bit of kit to manage even 1 G Internet, assuming all of it isn't VPN. Mine's currently managing two 50/50 Mbit PPPoE and a VDSL 24/2 Mbit line.

I bought it to keep up with the symmetric 50 mbit line I upgraded to and have resources left over for IPsec VPNs, IPv6 tunnels, cjdns tunnels, DN42 BGP VPNs and BIRD6 for my own IPv6 PI space.

Standard LEDE install

The LEDE devs decided not to have separate targets for the APUx series of boards and went with standard x86 target support. Patches for APU2 board support are in mainline LEDE now so they can be installed via opkg.
This is great as you need just dd LEDE version >=17.01.1 with luci on to the SSD/HDD/SD/USB, run opkg update and then install these packages for the rest of the hardware. Lots of interesting chatter on github here.

PACKAGES:=beep flashrom libsensors lm-sensors usbutils wpad-mini \ kmod-ath9k kmod-ath10k kmod-gpio-button-hotplug kmod-gpio-nct5104d \ kmod-hwmon-core kmod-hwmon-k10temp kmod-leds-apu2 kmod-leds-gpio kmod-pcspkr \ kmod-sound-core kmod-sp5100_tco kmod-usb-core kmod-usb-ohci kmod-usb-serial \ kmod-usb2 kmod-usb3 \ -kmod-e1000e -kmod-e1000 -kmod-r8169

To bring up a WLE600vx card, you may need the ath10k-firmware-qca988x package.

Custom LEDE build

The joy of LEDE is that we can create a custom build, and thanks go out to the sweet work done by https://github.com/riptidewave93
So git clone https://github.com/riptidewave93/LEDE-APU2.git and enable AMD Jaguar CPU optimizations with the -march=btver2 -mtune=btver2 GCC options. This can apparently boost performance around 50% on some applications.
His script makes creating builds as easy as: build.sh modify
Performance under Linux is significantly better (even without GCC optimizations) than FreeBSD, the links below show the CPU's AES-NI performance under load.

APU2 related links

APU2 - VPN Performance
linuxserver.io - LinITX APU2 Review
BSD Router Project - IPSec performance lab of a PC Engines APU2
PC Engines forum - APU2 pfsense with AES-NI performance stats