Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite: coming (hopefully) very soon.

[Juli Mallett]

Hey all,

My board arrived today and I had a few minutes waiting for a build, so
I added basic board support.  You can see the dmesg here:

http://people.freebsd.org/~jmallett/octeon-dmesg/ubiquiti-edgerouter-lite.txt

Note that the flash is connected via USB, which is kind of neat.  I
have not yet set up a filesystem on my device, but it looks like
everything should just work.  There may be a small issue with clocking
on some of the Ethernet parts which is trivial to fix, but I haven't
been able to verify whether we need the fix yet.  I'm unlikely to get
around to it very soon, but I thought people might be interested in
seeing FreeBSD on the EdgeRouter Lite!

Ubiquiti really did a good job here; it's a normalish RJ45 serial
console at 115200, and U-Boot is not restricted in any way.  And they
didn't do anything strange with the hardware that would require lots
of effort to make the Simple Executive work.  This should be a great
platform for FreeBSD, indeed.  I've got an order for a bunch more
coming in one of the next batches and intend to distribute them to
FreeBSD developers.  At $100/each including a power supply and case
they're a fabulous deal.

Thanks,
Juli.

On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 1:43 AM, Juli Mallett <juli at clockworksquid.com> wrote:
> 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.