looking for suggestions for a small router/appliance board/SoC

[John Nielsen]

On Oct 22, 2015, at 12:00 PM, Adrian Chadd <adrian.chadd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 22 October 2015 at 10:57, John Nielsen <lists at jnielsen.net> wrote:
>> I’m working on a proof-of-concept for a kind of networking swiss army knife. Can anyone suggest a board that meets the following requirements? CPU arch doesn’t matter as long as it will run FreeBSD (Atom, ARM, MIPS, etc).
>> 
>>  - Small form factor (SoC, probably)
>>  - Can support at least 2 802.11a/b/g/n adapters, prefer 3 (any combination of chip-integrated and mini PCI-e slots. Prefer to avoid USB if possible)
>>  - Has or supports at least 2 1GbE ports. Prefer 3-5 ports with switching functionality
>>  - Storage not super constrained. Built-in storage (if any) can be small (which I’m arbitrarily defining as less than 128MB) if there is also an SD card slot or similar. USB storage will do in a pinch.
>>  - Has at least 2 free USB ports after meeting previous requirements
>>  - Serial port or header (or GPIO pins that can be used as one? Not too familiar with that)
>>  - Low power consumption (within reason taking the above into account)
>>  - Low cost (again, within reason)
>> 
>> I may just start with a PC Engines apu1d, but if there are boards that are smaller, cheaper, have lower power requirements and/or have integrated wifi or switch capabilities I’d like to look in to them as well.
>> 
>> I know that might be asking a lot, so I’m also open to any suggestions that are most of the way there. Thanks!

> The PC engines boards are your best bet to begin with. There's updated
> ARM hardware from Gateworks but I don't recall if we ever got a port
> fully working on it.

Thanks for the pointer. Good to know the Avila boards boot. A Ventana board plus one or more expansion modules actually looks very versatile and capable of meeting all my requirements (except maybe cost :). The Laguna boards also look interesting, though probably not quite versatile enough for this particular project. Can anyone jog Adrian’s memory on the status of FreeBSD on either of those Gateworks board families?

JN