Durable/serious arm hardware ?

[Hagen Kühl]

On Mon, 23 Jan 2017 01:07:37 -0600
Jim Thompson <jim at netgate.com> wrote:

> 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.

It's great that you're doing this work, especially committing it back
into the tree.

What I would also be interested in, is a solution for an ARM based
wireless access point running FreeBSD. Right now I have one of my
Raspberry Pis set up to do it, but the wireless performance leaves
something to be desired.

Do you have any tips on what to use for that?

> 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