Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite: coming (hopefully) very soon.

[Juli Mallett]

Hey all,

My EdgeRouter Lite will be arriving soon and I just snagged a copy of
the GPL sources from Ubiquiti.  Assuming I'm understanding what's here
right, looks like the EdgeMax platform is Octeon-based, and should
require only very, very trivial modifications to FreeBSD.  The
modifications made for linux suggest UBNT calls the board an "E100".
It's $99 and dual-core CN50xx 500MHz.  A little disappointed it's not
an Octeon II, but that's hardly surprising.  By far the cheapest
Octeon system available and perhaps one of the best MIPS ones
available given the price point.  Should be a lot of fun.

Note that for reference I know of major OEMs that produce boards with
comparable specs that were looking for $300 each just a few months
ago.  These boards are a very fine bargain indeed, and FreeBSD
supports most of what's on them, and it will only take about 10
minutes to get a suitable FreeBSD kernel put together with hardware
in-hand.

(I may not be able to do it until late January due to other
commitments, but encourage anyone who has an EdgeRouter Lite in their
hands to give it a shot.  Just look at the changes Ubiquiti made to
the Simple Executive to add their private board type, add an
OCTEON_VENDOR_UBIQUITI (or _UBNT, I'm not picky) config option and add
the board type and go from there in the same way that other vendors'
boards have been supported.  It's a great entry-level kernel task.
The hardware is small and light, so I may take one with me in my
travels and see what I can find time for, but it'd be very cool to see
this supported in-tree as soon as possible.)

Thanks,
Juli.