[talk] new ARM board running FreeBSD

[Jim Thompson]

I know that talk@ loves ARM boards running BSD.

At Netgate we’ve been playing around with ARM for a while, and we have a new board to tell you about.

uFW (microFirewall) is a lot like a Beaglebone Black, but with two 1Gbps Ethernet interfaces.

The TI SoC actually has a 3 port 1Gbps switch on-die, and by using VLANs, one can create a highly-integrated “one-armed router”.

AM3352 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 SoC
512MB DDR3 RAM
4GB 8-bit eMMC on-board flash storage
Both Ethernets brought out to RJ45s, using 1Gbps PHYs
microSD socket for simple recovery/hacking
UART on microUSB
microUSB OTG port
5VDC input

uFW is pretty small.  At 77.4x43.2mm, smaller than RPi:

Pi Zero is 65x30mm https://www.raspberrypi.org/help/faqs/#generalDimensions
RPi is 85.60x56mm 

Photos with digital calipers at https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/731324140632727553

We booted FreeBSD -CURRENT on the board earlier tonight.  Links to a gist of the bootlog and a photo are in:
	https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/737874921435594753

pfSense for this platform is under active development.

Cheers,

Jim