Durable/serious arm hardware ?

[Bernd Walter]

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 09:12:01PM +0100, Hagen Kühl wrote:
> 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?

I wished we had PCI-Express support for the iMX6.
A Novena Board (probably not easy to source in the long run), or a
Technexion board have Mini-PCIe slots in which you can fit WiFi cards.
SDIO-WiFi (unsupported right now) and USB-WiFi are not the best
solutions for various reasons.

On the other hand, if you can live with the mass storage constrained
MIPS based Atheros SoCs you end up with many good options.
The only downside is that running / on USB stick turned out to be
unrelyable for unknown reasons on any Atheros SoC based board I've tested.

> > 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
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-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.