ARM platform for network router

[Adrian Chadd]

On 10 March 2014 12:16, Bernd Walter <ticso at cicely7.cicely.de> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 03:50:31PM +0100, Miroslav Chlastak wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>>  is there any box like ???alix/wrap boards???, that can be uset as router with ARM CPU? We are looking for a new platform with more power instead of Alix board. But every i386 platform is too expensive (when comparing to eg. routerboard).
>
> Take a look at the MIPS mailinglist.
> IIRC some people have FreeBSD running on routerboard hardware.
> And some even cheaper TP-Link (and noname) (mostly) Atheros based
> router hardware works fine.
> Most of them have small flash based filesystem space, but as many
> have USB you can run a full featured FreeBSD by using USB drives.
> Beside having an USB port you wan to look for at least 32MB or 64MB RAM.
> For example the carambola 2 using AR9331 with 64MB RAM runs fine, but
> unfortunately 8devices only wired 2 ethernet ports from the internal switch.
> The Atheros chip itself has 2 NIC, with one connected to an internal
> 5-port VLAN capable switch.
> Last time I've checked however FreeBSD had no support to configure the
> internal switch however.

We can configure the internal switch now. I haven't tested vlangroup
support on arswitch but it is supposed to work.

> But you can get countless boards using this and other supported Atrheros
> chips, just watch out for RAM, as there are boards with 8 and 16MB RAM
> only.
> Even without support to configure the switch you have 2 individual NIC.

.. and I'll fix the arswitch problems if I can get hardware to test it out with.


-a