Hardware Acceleration

One new feature in the 2025.1 Release is support for “Routing/NAT Offloading”, aka  Hardware Acceleration.  With this feature you can max out a 2.5G internet connection using the 2.5G ports! When enabled the CPU is barely used, so it has more cpu cycles to do other tasks.  You can enable this feature by navigating to Advanced -> Firewall -> Routing/NAT Offloading.  Two options are available “Hardware flow offloading” and “Software flow offloading”.  Since the GL-MT6000 does support Hardware flow offloading you should use that.

Another feature that dropped after the 2025.1 release is Wireless Ethernet Dispatch (WED). Currently for this feature you’ll have to run the latest nightly build, or wait for a future 2025.2 release.  This feature takes Hardware Acceleration another step and offloads the wifi traffic as well.

One drawback to Hardware Acceleration is that it’s incompatible with some Tomato features.  IPTraffic, Bandwidth Limiter, and QoS will not function properly with it enabled. The GL-MT6000 can handle at least up to a 1G internet connection (pppoe included) without Hardware Acceleration, so it’s not absolutely necessary to enable this feature unless you have speeds beyond 1G, or you want to free cpu cycles for other intensive work.