RISC-V port could be an idea?

[Schroinx]

With all the move towards European tech independence, an RISC-V router with opnsense could be a place to start. I have searched the English forums but no hits.

There are both smaller cards with RISC-V and 2 gbit ports, but also bigger P550-based, which with a 10gb nic could likely reach higher speeds as well. While the P550 is not European it can be used until there are European solutions.

Are opnsense only for firewall duty, or can it also be used for wireless, or do opnsennse users use something else like openWRT for that duty?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/riscv

https://www.elektormagazine.com/articles/the-risc-v-architecture-16-boards-mcus

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Are opnsense only for firewall duty, or can it also be used for wireless, or do opnsennse users use something else like openWRT for that duty?

FreeBSD is notoriously behind in features for wireless infrastructure mode so the general recommendation is not to try to turn OPNsense into an access point. This is unlikely to change unless someone throws money at the problem. There is no capacity (developers) and the FreeBSD foundation has more important areas to sponsor.

That being said there is Mikrotik located in Latvia. I like their products.

[Schroinx]

@PatricMH

Thx. I'll give them a look.

That still leaves the main question.

[Greg_E]

I have a few Mikrotik devices, just switches though, pretty good stuff and cheaper than a lot of other products. I have a small 10gbe switch in my production system, and an even larger 10gbe switch in my lab. I do think the larger switch might be slightly faster, but it also might be a difference in software loaded, something I need to update for the small switch. CRS309-1g-8s+ and CRS326-24s+2q+ are the two that I use.

Never used their wireless yet, but I may go through and do an upgrade at home, would be nice to have better signal in the back yard, so an external unit might be nice.

[passeri]

I have a couple of Mikrotik CRS304 10GB switches and a CRS310 2.5GB, all handling the backbone under my Dec697 primary firewall. I also use a few of their APs for various purposes. They do not have the most advanced radios, currently on WiFi 6 rather than WiFi 7 for example, but then a lot of devices are still barely making it to WiFi6 while a lot of traffic does not need the speed anyway. Their advantages for me are low cost and incredibly flexible setup with ROS, but with a steep learning curve. Opnsense GUI is far easier and documentation far superior. These are important advantages for making sure you stay secure, the primary aim at the edge. Another reason Mikrotik will never replace Opnsense as my primary firewall is that I try to avoid common-mode failure. The switches and radios (indoor and outdoor) are well worth investigation though, if you are OK with ROS.

[millerwissen]

Sorry for resurrecting old thread but I just wanted to leave my interest for RISC-V and not only it's great for everyone outside of the US not being tied to US tech, it's going to allow us to have far greater competition in the market and for opnsense this is quite important, I do think you might also have to at least consider moving to Linux for RISC-V even though it's not a related project TrueNAS did move to Linux with SCALE and that went pretty well especially in terms of hardware support.

FreeBSD is quite mature with PF and other aspects that work quite well for firewall projects and I also like that FreeBSD gets some love and use still on this front so I would much rather see FreeBSD catch up to RISCV than switch to linux also makes it far more realistic to add RISCV support to OPNsense/pFsense than to fork or even start a whole new project from scratch like IXSystems did with TrueNAS SCALE though this would cost a lot of time and development. There was a linux based firewall eons ago I think it was called ClearOS but it's probably completely dead now it was Linux based though the performance was not even close to pfsense/opnsense but it had a lot more bloat with it.