Durable/serious arm hardware ?

[Russell Haley]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 11:46 AM, Bernd Walter <ticso at cicely7.cicely.de> wrote:
> 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.

There are a few good iMX6 boards out there. There are quite a few
things not supported unfortunately.

<notice of amateurs opinion>
SDIO wifi seems to be very common now, with quite a few chip vendors
using it (But Mr. Chadd would be a better person to verify that).
Using SDIO saves a PCIe or USB slot and can more than support 802.11n
for throughput (from my understanding).
</notice of amateurs opinion>

The SDIO driver is in the dev tree, but Mr. Losh seems to be working
on the arguably higher priority u-boot fragmentation. On a personal
note, I just moved into a house and may soon have a spare room for a
lab and some time to try and help out with SDIO or iMX6 stuff. Here's
to wishful thinking! ;)

Russ

> 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.
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