this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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You're not going to have fun when using OpenVPN. Even Wireguard will be a stretch. The Raspberry Pi does not have any hardware cryptography acceleration built-in and the raw compute power is very limited.
EDIT: Maybe you're going to have acceptable speeds after all? Take a look at the Raspberry results here: https://github.com/cyyself/wg-bench?tab=readme-ov-file#test-results
Ran WireGuard on a Pi1 and it was fine for two users. Albeit WireGuard was the ONLY thing running aside from a Gitlab Runner.
A 4b should be more than enough for many use cases except things that cause torrents of packets - but even then YMMV. It really depends on the workload.
One bit of advice: if you can, use a storage device other than the micro-sd slot for the 4B. Again YMMV.
You could use Tail Scale. It runs great on a Pi
Can I run OpenVPN configs on it and use it as a roiter
Define great. Tailscale doesn't even run Wireguard on the kernel level, but in user space.
I already have a pi4B just wanted to find a use case for it. Is it really that bad? so how consumer routers with a fifth computing power run vpns?
With hardware acceleration.
Computing power isn't just a general quantity. Networking devices have dedicated chips in them to perform various parts of processes. (Encryption, decryption, encoding, decoding, compression, decompression, etc.)
That's hardware acceleration. There are chips that are super efficient and powerful but they can only do that one thing.
That's fine if you know exactly what the device is going to be for, so you can put in the exact chips it needs to do only what it needs to do.
Makes sense Well explained thanks. I guess I'll find a dedicated VPN router
I think GL.inet has tiny ones you can use.
gl.iNet definitely shows your expected VPN speed (OpenVPN and Wireguard) on their product pages, which is great.
Still, if you need gigabit speeds, those devices usually can not provide that.
I checked GL.inet is not available where I live
Sell it and get something more suited to the task instead of trying to shoehorn it onto a pi.
I think you're right. I guess I need a wired router that can run OpenVPN on stock firmware or supported by and OpenWRT can be installed on it and has the hardware needed to run OpenVPN clients. The problem is I don't know what to buy now and honestly where I live there are not many options