ARM Support

[orangana]

This time? Maybe?

Context:

17.1: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=2441.msg29897#msg29897
18.1: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=7741.msg35479#msg35479
19.1: https://forum.opnsense.org/index.php?topic=10937.msg50053#msg50053

[lattera]

So, take what I'm about to say with a bit of a grain of salt. In this case, I'm not speaking on behalf of the OPNsense project here. I'm just providing a little bit of background info.

With OPNsense 19.1, OPNsense will have switched fully to HardenedBSD as the base operating system. Yay! I've committed to providing basic 32-bit Intel (i386) support to OPNsense for 2019. Outside of this limited scope, HardenedBSD does not support 32-bit architectures. In 2020, OPNsense will drop i386 support as they migrate to HardenedBSD 12 (I will be guiding them along this process, of course).

It would make much more sense for OPNsense to start targeting arm64. The problem, though, is that all these little arm64 SoC dev boards require a slightly different version of U-Boot. So OPNsense would have to generate installation media for each board, whether it be the Raspberry Pi 3, Pine64, Pine64-LTS, Rock64, etc. This is very quite painful, because it takes a lot of resources. Now, OPNsense may deem it worthwhile, so that's not my place to say.

I'd be interested to see more arm64 systems like what SoftIron and Cavium provide, where UEFI is used instead of U-Boot. That would make it really easy for OPNsense to support arm64. It would be possible for OPNsense to do that regardless of the state of these SoC dev boards.