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---
title: SMART SFP - Mini Linux System on a Stick (Literally)
description: A hands-on exploration of the Plumspace Smart SFP — a dual-core ARM Cortex A53 Linux system embedded inside a standard SFP optical transceiver form factor. The...
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og:description: A hands-on exploration of the Plumspace Smart SFP — a dual-core ARM Cortex A53 Linux system embedded inside a standard SFP optical transceiver form factor. The...
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# SMART SFP - Mini Linux System on a Stick (Literally)

**[apalrd's adventures](https://daily.dev/sources/apalrd)** · 12 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A hands-on exploration of the Plumspace Smart SFP — a dual-core ARM Cortex A53 Linux system embedded inside a standard SFP optical transceiver form factor. The post covers practical use cases including transparent bridging (with ntopng traffic analysis), IPv4/IPv6 routing, NAT44, NAT46/CLAT using Tayga, and WireGuard VPN via network namespaces. Benchmark results are provided throughout: bridging achieves ~895 Mbps, routing ~915 Mbps, NAT44 ~932 Mbps, while NAT46 drops to ~357 Mbps due to CPU-bound translation. OpenSSL benchmarks show AES-128-GCM reaching ~430 MB/s and ChaCha20-Poly1305 ~167 MB/s at large block sizes, giving a sense of VPN encryption headroom on this tiny device.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.apalrd.net/posts/2025/network_smartsfp>

## Questions this post answers

### What throughput can the Plumspace Smart SFP achieve when used as a Linux bridge or router?

The Plumspace Smart SFP achieves approximately 895 Mbps in bridging mode and 915 Mbps in routing mode, measured with iperf3. Adding NAT44 via iptables-legacy keeps throughput near line rate at ~932 Mbps. NAT46/CLAT translation via Tayga is the bottleneck, dropping throughput to around 357 Mbps due to CPU-bound IPv4/IPv6 translation on the dual-core ARM Cortex A53.

_Engineers evaluating compact embedded networking hardware track real-world benchmarks like these on daily.dev._

### How do I set up WireGuard with network namespaces on Linux so LAN and WAN are isolated?

Create a network namespace for the LAN side, move the downstream interface into it, then launch wireguard-go from the default (WAN) namespace before moving the wg0 adapter into the LAN namespace. WireGuard always sends and receives from the namespace it was started in, so the order matters: start wireguard-go first, configure it with wg setconf, then move the tun adapter with ip link set dev wg0 netns. Run dnsmasq and forwarding rules inside the namespace.

_Developers building isolated VPN gateway setups on Linux find namespace gotchas like this covered on daily.dev._

### What are the OpenSSL AES-128-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 speeds on an ARM Cortex A53?

On a dual-core ARM Cortex A53 (as found in the Plumspace Smart SFP), OpenSSL 3.0.17 benchmarks show AES-128-GCM reaching ~430 MB/s and AES-256-GCM ~381 MB/s at 16 KB block sizes. ChaCha20-Poly1305 peaks at ~167 MB/s at large blocks but outperforms AES at small blocks (27 MB/s vs 4 MB/s at 16 bytes), indicating no hardware AES acceleration.

_Those sizing embedded VPN hardware for encryption workloads find comparative benchmarks across devices on daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#linux](https://daily.dev/tags/linux), [#networking](https://daily.dev/tags/networking), [#arm](https://daily.dev/tags/arm)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/smart-sfp---mini-linux-system-on-a-stick-literally--ncfdhpq1d)

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