Durable/serious arm hardware ?

[Jim Thompson]

We have a little two port router based on the same SoC as the BBB.  I
selected that platform as one of the better supported platforms on
FreeBSD.  It still took a lot of (months of) work to make the freebsd (and
subsequently pfSense) for it into something that could be a "product".  All
the FreeBSD work is in the tree.  Most vendors don't do that. That's not a
humble brag, it's a statement of truth.

We're currently in discussions with a vendor to get the Ethernet driver for
our next ARM product, since, ..., it's not in the tree.

The SoC vendors all have Linux on the brain.  They see a much larger market
there. Convincing them to dedicate resources to FreeBSD can be challenging.
One of the things we've been able to do with pfSense is to show real volume
for a FreeBSD based application.  I can go to a SoC vendor (TI, Marvell,
etc) and talk about committing to, say, N x 10K+ unit volumes.  That tends
to help get their attention. The Foundation helps a lot here, too, which is
why I won't take "donations" for pfsense and instead direct people to
donate to the FreeBSD Foundation.

In closing, the board you name are all "developer / hobbyist" boards, and
may not have the level of engineering in them that it takes to make into a
product.  At least two of them are price-supported, where a non-profit gets
some portion of the BoM discounted, which makes for a very low-price board,
but also brings some short-cutting (try to get a warranty claim on a BBB or
RPi).

Jim


On Sunday, January 22, 2017, nowhere <florence44638 at caliopea.com> wrote:

>
> Hello
>
> I'd like to hear from the most skilled of you, if anybody knows serious
> arm based hardware or share this though : I'm becoming convinced that
> theses hardware (arm based) are just the consumable-smartphone fashion
> counterpart for kids and leisures or tests. Not really final and carefully
> finished products; abble to works for years or a decade; doing is job in a
> office corner, being forgotten  by anyone, like some of my older freebsd
> servers wich are running for a decade now.
>
>
> Those past years, I've bought 3 arm based devices :
>
> 1 raspberry-pi , which was affected by the "micron-ram-chip" bug: except
> with debian, it never booted on freebsd (I even tried netbsd): I just
> trashed it yesterday (bought in 2014 i think).
>
> 1 Beagleboneblack : works fine for weeks then freeze suddenly. And
> sometimes did not event reboot (*): had to loop-reset it until boot process
> go to the end. Seem the most "workable" product so far.. (bought in 2015)
>
> 1 olimex a20-lime2-emmc: my most recent buy. It did not event boot with
> network with it's own debian sd card... (I did not yet take time to make
> it's own freebsd sd card): (bought in 2016-07).
>
> My goals, for example, with theses boards were to give some of my nomads
> customers, a box with an autonomous dhcp/dns/vpn server on theyr networks,
> without the need to change anything else than disabling their dhcp servers
> for instance : I think a Quad xeon racked server is a bit too much for
> theses tasks; I was using pfsence on pcengines boards before to do this
> kind of things.
>
> Since my conclusions are based only on theses 3 boards, I'd like to hear
> from thoses of you who works daily with these boards, and thoses opinion
> are based on far more than my hand counted experiences.
>
>
> PM.
>
>
>
> (*) I work with a 5V/5A (25w) psu: that's not an overloaded psu problem;
> Not a damaged emmc/sd card problem too: all my systems are read-only-root
> based: seems to really be an hardware issue.
>
>
>
>
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