Anyone in need of FreeBSD-supported MIPS hardware?

[James Jones]

I am working on some embedded router projects and could use some. :)


Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 1, 2012, at 9:30 PM, "Juli Mallett" <juli at clockworksquid.com> wrote:

> I have a large number of MIPS boards / systems that I'd like to make
> available to interested developers who have clear goals for which
> hardware would be useful.  I have some small and cheap RouterBoard and
> RouterStation hardware for someone who's just looking to get their
> feet wet.
> 
> I also have a bunch of Octeon hardware from low-end to high-end,
> mostly Octeon Plus (i.e. CN5xxx-based), but also a couple of Octeon XL
> boards.  All of the Octeon hardware I have is SMP.  Some is very
> esoteric and would require a lot of effort to fully support (but
> sample Linux code should be available; in one case there is a vendor
> that is refusing to release GPL'd sources, which I may ask the FSF for
> help with.)
> 
> I have a large number of Radisys ATCA-7220 boards which are varying
> degrees of functional.  These consist of an e500-based LMP running
> Linux (basically a host/management system), two Octeon CN5860
> (16-core, high-end) units, each with 8GB of RAM, connected to a
> high-end 10GbE switch, with a large number of SFP+ ports, which is
> capable of acting as an ATCA switch as well.  I have two ATCA
> chassises and can recommend ones that are available cheaply on eBay
> for someone who is interested in adding something loud and overwrought
> to their test setup.
> 
> Each Octeon unit on the Radisys ATCA boards is a PCI target attached
> to the LMP.  I have Octeon evaluation boards which can be used as
> PCI-X targets or hosts, and a couple of Octeon boards which can be
> used as PCIe targets or hosts.  In PCI target mode, the Octeon system
> can be booted and debugged by the host and can be used as a
> programmable, intelligent NIC running FreeBSD or a standalone
> application.  FreeBSD does not support Octeon devices in target mode
> at present, but it should be easy to do so (both for the host and
> target), and I can put you in touch with people who have done this
> before with FreeBSD if you have any questions.
> 
> Some of the hardware I have can support USB, some can support SATA
> disks, and some can only support CF.  Although the Radisys blades
> provide a lot of RAM and CPU, to turn them into a MIPS package cluster
> would require first solving some issues with their networking and
> second providing network attached storage of some sort.
> 
> If you're interested, please contact me privately.  I would prefer to
> give hardware only to people who have some idea of what they will work
> on and who do not currently have any MIPS (or at least not any Octeon,
> if requesting Octeon hardware) hardware of their own.
> 
> Also, if someone has 5u of rack space and a bunch of power and extant
> 10GbE infrastructure, I can provide a 5u ATCA chassis loaded with
> hardware.  I'm sure that would be useful in general for people doing
> networking work with FreeBSD, as the hardware can very easily be used
> to do real networking loads at 10GbE line rate, or as a simple traffic
> generator, but it's also loud and hot and annoying.  ATCA is "fun".
> (If anyone has a spare one of those nice single-slot bench-top ATCA
> development kit enclosures, please let me know; I would be quite eager
> to purchase or trade for it, or several if possible.  Or even just a
> non-finicky single-board ATCA bench power supply.  "Carrier grade"
> seems to mean that the tools involved are so complex and numerous that
> several people need to be employed full-time to keep the thing
> running.  I digress.)
> 
> If you're interested in just a small project, too, I'm happy to ship
> hardware out for a brief duration and receive it back.  The Octeon
> stuff is generally kind-of fun because of all the interesting offload
> stuff it has.  Why not add software RAID offload support to FreeBSD,
> or create infrastructure for compression offload in the kernel to go
> with our crypto offload?  I had a lot of fun working on using Octeon's
> SHA offload to do BitCoin mining, and that's the sort of thing that
> can even be done over SSH as a regular user.
> 
> Anyway, I know there's a lot of developers out there interested in
> FreeBSD on MIPS, and I'd love to help any and all get started.
> 
> Thanks,
> Juli.
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