@alroute said in 3rd Party Hardware Request:
I'm guessing Netgate doesn't want to price the 2100 down at home user prices because it might lose small business revenue and the same for access points which I'm guessing are universal to all.
Perhaps you can't simply make it any cheaper without loosing money? Because all electronics prices have gone through the roof and nothing got cheaper at all? There's a reason why consumer/SOHO electronics is cheap, while more flexible hardware and software is not. That's not something to do with "they don't want to make it cheaper" or "they don't like their software running on toasters". It's just that no one wants to pay for that. You can't just throw the software on cheap SOHO hardware and hope it will work just because "it's also an ARM SOC/CPU". There are vastly different ARM SOCs and they have licenses etc. for accessing their tools and drivers etc. Why is Netgate running espressobin-like hardware on those SG1100-3100? Because it's mostly the same SOC and was (guessing) relatively easy to adapt FreeBSDs ARM branch on it.
We can see how "identical normal x86/64 hardware" runs every day. They aren't the same just because they may have the same NIC and CPU in it. Developing on different hardware is far more complex than "just throw it on and have a look at it". Otherwise one could simple extract the installer from e.g. a SG1100 and throw it on a Raspi4 (won't work - different ARM SOC) or on a smartphone perhaps? Those are ARM, too? Nope. Not that easy. And the menhours that go into such things as developing and testing on new hardware is what makes things time consuming and expensive to ensure the stuff is actually running quite nicely when you try to install/update it. Add to that, that many hardware vendors for WiFi, SOCs (Quallcom for ARM etc.) like to have "binary blobs" in their drivers that may only work on Linux or have problems to get them to run on FreeBSD - or even incompatible licenses to BSD/Apache Licenses? Those are just the problems on top of it.
Have you seen 08/15 SOHO hardware with more then 1-2y firmware support? I found them very rare. Mostly the have have a few updates and are then abandoned for the next bigger better version. Also because of ever evolving HW standards of WiFi and such, most SOHO routers tend to get switched out around 2ys. Firewall hardware normally lasts way longer than that in my experience in our company (not Netgate BTW).
@alroute said in 3rd Party Hardware Request:
I noted from the Netgate Website that youa re intending to provide support for Pfsense to be used on 3rd party routers.
Actually don't know where you found that. I only know of "supporting 3rd party hardware" and with that they are only talking about compatible (x64 Intel/amd) 3rd party hardware router boxes or barebones that you can buy/build yourself. I found nowhere they state, that they plan to run on 3rd party routers as an alternative firmware like OpenWRT or DD-WRT or Tomato. That's - AFAIK - far outside the project scope.
Cheers
\jens
