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Sorry for the late reply!
Was busy with other stuff lately, had little to no time and to totally forgot to reply.

Hello @efetropy,

Can you share the patches required to build opnsense 22.1 for a Raspberry Pi 4? I'd like to help with this.

I'm just getting started and have finally understood how to build it but missing the specific configuration for RPI4.

Dear all,

Currently, I have a CM4 (with 4GB RAM and 8GB eMMC and no Wifi) and the DFRobot IoT Router Carrier Board (https://www.dfrobot.com/product-2242.html).

I am interested to compile an OPNsense build for this hardware but I am a little bit lost about it's potential compatibility.

Can someone confirm me that's this will be good or not?

Many thanks in advance!

There is already an image built by @yrzr for the RPi which can be found here:
https://ftp.yrzr.tk/opnsense/FreeBSD%3A13%3Aaarch64/22.1/images/

A generic aarch64 vmdk image is also available (for e.g. for proxmox, esxi fling or whatever you're using).

The RPi 4B should work without problems (if not, just get some different boot files).

CM4 is a different case. It does work with the official I/O board albeit PCIe issues (see bugzilla).
Your carrier board states ETH2: PCI Express 1000BASE-T NIC (based on RTL8111). RTL8111 drivers are in fact available, but
it will be a hit or miss and you might not be able to the use the 2nd ethernet port due to the mentioned PCIe issues.
Furthermore, you have to figure out how to deal with the dtb file. Worst case scenario, you might have to make it compatible with freebsd.

I can confirm that the 22.1 image made by YRZR works with DFrobot carrier board with CM4 with 8GB Ram. Unfortunately the performance is only around 300Mb/s on 1Gb connection. Maybe some tuning needed to get better results. The cpu was only at 40% during downloads. Has anyone got better performance?

I guess nothing officially supported at the moment. But the YRZR ARM64 code is now 26.7.2021 merged to official code base. So you can compile your own ARM64 based images by following the guide at https://github.com/opnsense/tools

I have the DFrobot carrier board with dual 1Gb PCI NIC's and RPI4 compute module with 8GB RAM trying to get that to work at some point. But I think that still needs the FreeBSD 13 base that is coming in OPNsense 22.1

Thanks franco for the quick fix.

ARM might not be fully supported but OPNsense works quite well if you just compile it and the packages yourself. Only thing really missing from official/half support is just the package and update repositories are missing. Little bit of hassle to host own repo's for that.

I think I saw the same reboot issue when I complied my ARM VMWare image and running OPNsense on RPI4. YRZR seems to have found quick fix for the issue. https://www.yrzr.tk/opnsense-images-for-aarch64/#21-reboot-issue-must-read

So before first reboot run in command line:

Code Select Expand

echo 'hw.uart.console=""' > /boot/loader.conf.local

This worked for me and after this I can reboot normally. Maybe something to fix in the source code.

There are already ready made images available for NanoPi R4S https://mirror.fkardame.com/Linux/Images/FriendlyArm/NanoPi%20R4s/ and discussion here https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=20332.0

You can also compile your own ARM 64 bit packages and images with tools found here https://github.com/yrzr/tools/tree/preview and more detelais here https://www.yrzr.tk/opnsense-images-for-aarch64/ and discussion here https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=12186.0

The official OPNsense https://github.com/opnsense/tools/ here don't work on 64bit ARM at the moment on April 2021. The official code seems to refer to 64bit ARM as arm64 and aarch64 mixed in the code and that's why it mostly does not work(should be aarch64). Also some other issues fixed by yrzr.  Hopefully YRZR fixes will be merged there some day and we will get official repos like I suggested in the first post.

I have been searching for how to install OPNsense on ARM boxes. I see there are some topics around specific hardware like NanoPi R4S. I'm looking for a guide install OPNsense on any ARM device. Is the process so that I first install FreeBSD on my ARM device and then bootstrap OPNsense on? Does anyone have this guide to share?

Also I have a suggestion for the OPNsense project to have one official release image per version for one ARM device. What I gather from messages that general ARM release is difficult because different u-boot systems on each board. But having official ARM image and support even with just one reference board, would still benefit the whole ARM community by bringing official package/plugin support for all. This way one could get the "official" ARM hardware or figure out the booting for their own hardware.

There are quite many interesting hardware choices for ARM firewall boxes. Just a few
1.Macchiatobin(10Gig ports), Espressobin(cheap), Clearfog GT 8K(many 1Gig ports)
2.Raspberry PI 4 compute module(lot of compute module boards coming with multiple NICs)
3.NanoPi R4S (small, cheap, 6 core CPU)