Suggestions for low-power gigE firewall?

John Nielsen john at jnielsen.net
Mon Jun 16 19:51:54 UTC 2014


On Jun 15, 2014, at 3:08 AM, Peter Jeremy <peter at rulingia.com> wrote:

> On 2014-Jun-13 08:17:33 -0400, Chris Nehren <cnehren+freebsd-stable at pobox.com> wrote:
>> Speaking of Soekris elsethread, I'm presently interested in
>> picking up a small device to use as a router + firewall for my
>> home network.
> 
> One thing to keep in mind is that 'gigE firewall' is fairly meaningless by
> itself.  Most of the load is per-packet and GigE could be anywhere between
> (roughly) 80kpps and 1.5mpps.
> 
> That said, since you mention 'home network', I presume you don't need complex
> packet manipulation at wire-speed.  Note that whilst the re(4) driver doesn't
> have the same comments as the rl(4) driver, you will still need significantly
> more CPU power to get the same thruput from a RTL8111 as (eg) an em.

I recently built a low-power FreeBSD box with this board:
http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Product_Detail.aspx?DetailID=1499

The onboard re(4) NIC needs a patch[1] (present in 10-STABLE but not 10.0-RELEASE) to function properly. Otherwise it's been a smooth ride.

It only has one onboard NIC but expansion options include PCI-e (mini and full) and USB 3.0.

I have enjoyed using pcengines' Alix boards in the past, but wanted more memory for this application than the new APU boards support.

JN

[1] http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=262391



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