Net4801 Replacement

[Charles Sprickman]

On Jan 22, 2014, at 6:58 PM, George Rosamond wrote:

> Charles Sprickman:
>> 
>> Is ARM on FreeBSD progressing at a pace where we might one day be
>> able to load pfSense up on a routerboard?  For reasons too
>> complicated to explain at the moment, I have four of these on the
>> workbench, and the hardware is cool.  iptables though is making me
>> want to murder things though.
>> 
>> http://routerboard.com/RB2011UiAS-RM (5x GigE, 5x FastE, $120)
>> 
>> http://routerboard.com/RB1100AHx2 (13 GigE, $350)
>> 
> 
> I thought routerboard is PPC.. not ARM…

Yeah, I have ARM on the brain I guess.

The boxes I'm playing with are "mipsbe".  One of the other large
models is PPC, and the big one is "tile", which I've not heard of
before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TILE64

The Ubiquiti "EdgeRouter", which ships with Vyatta, is MIPS as well.
I think all the Ubiquity wireless gear is MIPS.

The only reason I'm pointing out these brands is that they are both
huge in the WISP world, and these guys apparently do enough volume
to be insanely cheap.  While probably not feasible, they would be
great porting targets due to the cost and the large number of them
out in the field.  Low costs means it's easier to donate a pile to 
anyone doing the porting work too...

> (PPC.. .yeah, that architecture people have been telling OpenBSD to drop
> to save power costs….)

Did anyone suggest Theo install CFL lighting throughout his house? :)

> And the ARM stuff is moving along... lots of boards mostly supported,
> but there's issues on and off.  Nothing seems quite there just yet,
> AFAIK.  Not sure if any have more than one NIC.
> 
> GJB (onlist) is looking at producing an official image for the RPi based
> on 10-RELEASE.
> 
> I had heard pfSense was looking at ARM carefully, but it's been a while.

Small and cheap is a big win.  Putting together an x86 box that's
tiny AND cheap is not easy.

> Next daycon on "beyond x86"?

I'd be interested in hearing about both what all the BSDs support in
that area as well as having someone really familiar with linux on
non-x86 give an overview of just what's supported there (as
something of a benchmark).

C

> 
> g
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