
OpenBSD on EdgeRouter Lite - ingve
http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/OpenBSD-on-ERL
======
faragon
That router uses as CPU a Cavium Octeon processor (MIPS architecture) with two
cores. It supports MIPS 64 r2 and aligned data access, and it is a great
platform for running big-endian unit tests.

It boots from a internal USB drive, that can be removed and changed (the only
problem is that not all drives are compatible, and also, in most cases you
will have to the pendrive in order to use it, not a problem).

I bought it not long ago for doing big endian on both 32 and 64 bit modes, and
I can not be more happy. Amazing stuff. My intention was to put directly
OpenBSD, but the default Linux distribution it uses (Vyatta, Debian
derivative) works very well, being able to install packages via apt-get, so I
use it too. To be able to run OpenBSD just changing the USB stick is amazing,
and great for testing without spending lots of money on more expensive stuff
(e.g. while there are many affordable, and quite good, routers with fast
single-core MIPS 24K and 74K -e.g. TP Link-, usually have small flash disk
(4-16MB) and low RAM (16-64MB), having to use remote filesystems or cross
compiling; with the EdgeRouter Lite you can build and run, without worrying
with cross compilers nor remote filesystems).

Amazing hardware: USB boot means no device brick risk, multiple OS boot. Also,
is _very_ stable, no matter if it gets a bit hot, I had 0 hangs since I bought
many months ago. Despite being not cheap, compared to other domestic
equipment, it is worth it every cent it costs. In my opinion.

P.S. As contrast, another device I use for unit testing, a GuruPlug (ARMv5),
has the risk of being bricked, make me being afraid of installing anything not
really necessary (the point of using an ARMv5 instead of an ARMv6 like
Raspberry Pi, is that the Pi supports unaligned memory access, so if you want
to check those cases, you can't).

~~~
MertsA
It's probably much too late for this to be helpful, but the issue with not all
flash drives being compatible is because that version of uboot would probe for
USB devices very early on and it doesn't probe again if it doesn't find
anything. Changing bootdelay won't fix that because that happens afterwards.
It can boot from practically any flash drive if you prepend "usb reset;" to
bootcmd and then do a saveenv. Be careful when doing this, all of that
configuration isn't stored on the flash drive obviously so if you aren't
comfortable with uboot you can easily brick the router. Just do a printenv
first and make sure to copy down the old bootcmd just in case you need it to
recover.

~~~
faragon
Thank you for the explanation. That is not really a problem, as there is
information about drives known to work (you can reach it e.g. via Google).
Also, USB pendrives are cheap, so just trying with pendrives you already have
it is probable you find many already working properly.

------
dewyatt
How does this compare to a PC Engines APU w/pfSense?

[http://store.netgate.com/kit-APU1C4.aspx](http://store.netgate.com/kit-
APU1C4.aspx)

[http://bsdrp.net/documentation/examples/forwarding_performan...](http://bsdrp.net/documentation/examples/forwarding_performance_lab_of_a_pc_engines_apu)

I guess the EdgeRouter is cheaper at least.

~~~
oofabz
The PC Engines APU is great. Soekris is another hardware company making high-
performance BSD-compatible routers:

[http://soekris.com/products/net6501-1.html](http://soekris.com/products/net6501-1.html)

------
_yy
Does not support the hardware offloading though, so you're not getting the
advertised processing speed.

~~~
ised
But, as with RPi, you get to boot your own choice of OS.

In my opinion the advantage of this (=more control) easily outweighs tradeoff
of not "opting in" to hardware features enabled via binary blobs.

A MIPS board that pretty much "just works" with BSD kernels. No brainer. I'll
take it.

~~~
mattthebaker
If this is your goal, then EdgeRouter X would be a much better choice. It has
a faster CPU but no offloading, so it would outperform the Lite in this use
case. The MSRP is also half that of the Lite.

~~~
throwaway2048
it wouldn't because at this time there is seemingly no alternate operating
system that supports it.

------
gcb0
$91 for a router with a few mb of ram?

with some $20 more you can build a amd 5350 or a Intel j9200 with some 4 port
pcie network card and have any os on a fully capable computer, probably using
less power than that thing.

~~~
ubercore
The hardware offloading (which seems to be missing with OpenBSD) is what makes
that a great piece of hardware for the price.

------
nickysielicki
Though they have little in common besides "O-P-E-N" in their name, it's worth
noting that OpenWRT works on a lot of Ubiquiti products, too.

~~~
snowwindwaves
Doesn't Ubiquiti use openwrt as their base?

~~~
nkw
I believe vyatta is their base.

~~~
_yy
Not always.

~~~
detaro
But for the product discussed here it is. (They actually hired some of the
Vyatta devs to work on it, since the upstream project seems to be left to die
at Brocade)

~~~
ddeck
_since the upstream project seems to be left to die at Brocade_

Indeed, Brocade closed sourced the main product in 2012 and left the community
edition to die.

Thankfully the Vyatta core was forked in 2013 (renamed VyOS) and is under
active development as a free open source project. [1]

[1] [http://vyos.net/wiki/Main_Page](http://vyos.net/wiki/Main_Page)

