Raspberry Pi 3 With WiFi And Bluetooth

For me, built-in wifi is a nice to have given that it could reduce the total system cost assuming that the price per board remains the same.

That said however, for me the biggest improvement that I would like to see in the next generation would be support for 2160p 4K resolution on the hdmi port. Can anyone determine from the photos if the RPi 3 chipset would make 4K support a reality?

I'm still waiting for a Raspberry Pi with two built-in NICs. Would make a nice and cheap gateway/firewall/proxy.

kikinovak: I agree, that would be nice to have. I'm actually using an RPi as a gateway/firewall at home, and did it with a usb ethernet adapter to get the second port.

That worked fine for my purposes, and after thinking about it, I'm not sure I would advocate adding the cost of a second interface to _all_ RPis given that most applications need only one port or no ports at all. And the addition of on-board wifi in the RPi3 probably means that the ethernet will be unneeded for the majority of use cases going forward.

@kikinovak, penguinist:

It's possible to assign multiple IP addresses to the same physical ethernet port, even if the IPs are on different networks. However, the hardware can only handle a certain amount of bandwidth. So, while it's possible to set the one port to run on two different networks, you will have less than optimal bandwidth across both nets simultaneously.

dotmatrix: That's a very interesting thought that I had not considered. In a gateway application, then both the external public network and the internal private network would share the same switch and a pair of virtual interface configurations would then segregate the routing.

Huh... that should work.

I'm not even sure that the bandwidth would be significantly degraded since most switches support per-channel packet buffering and independent speed settings. There might be some kernel level contention with two virtual interfaces competing for the same physical port, but that would most likely have minimal impact on bandwidth.

Interesting idea. Worth checking out!

I'd have to think about the security implications of this though. The external public connection would have MAC level access to the internal private network. That would give your ISP access potentially to your private network directly through the switch bypassing your gateway's firewall.

On second thought, I think I'll stay with the segregated two-interface gateway architecture.

@penguinist:

look up...

macvlan

GNU/Linux networking is nearly infinitely malleable...

For some really neat ideas, look up:

IEEE 802.1Q

****

And then consider that you can configure a single physical ethernet port for multiple MACs, each MAC with multiple networks, each network with multiple VLANs.

However, having said that --- two NICs make lots of things much easier.

Also, one-NIC NAT is entirely possible. I did it twelve years ago on my home system.