Is anyone running pfSense on PowerPC or SPARC?
-
I guess this is fundamentally a BSD question, but I know almost nothing about BSD. If someone has a successful pfSense deployment on a PPC or SPARC machine, I'd love to know. I'm thinking G5 Macintosh, POWER4, SPARC64 or newer chips.
-
Why? just why?
G5 stuff is old by today's standards. Sparc etc - packages aren't compiled for.
You would have to do an enormous amount of work to make it happen.
-
Why? To put to use some old equipment that might still have some use as a dedicated pfSense box. I don't subscribe to the disposable attitude that pervades the consumer culture.
-
Why? To put to use some old equipment that might still have some use as a dedicated pfSense box. I don't subscribe to the disposable attitude that pervades the consumer culture.
Ok, G5s were particularly power hungry beasts, so the amount of time, porting drivers, os, packages, combined with the sheer wattage of a G5 box is just silly. I am all for recycling consumer hardware but that is just bonkers.
-
Why? To put to use some old equipment that might still have some use as a dedicated pfSense box. I don't subscribe to the disposable attitude that pervades the consumer culture.
Ok, G5s were particularly power hungry beasts, so the amount of time, porting drivers, os, packages, combined with the sheer wattage of a G5 box is just silly. I am all for recycling consumer hardware but that is just bonkers.
One mans bonkers is another mans interesting experiment/mountain to climb :)
FreeBSD has been x86/amd64 as the primary platforms for a long time. PowerPC has traction in the mailing lists, as do ARM and SPARC (SPARC is up and down). x86/amd64 are Tier 1 platforms (fully supported), PPC, SPARC64, ARM are Tier 2, so I'm guessing it may be a good bit of effort to get pfSense up and running on your specific hardware. I'm guessing you'd get very familiar with the pfSense build process.
https://www.freebsd.org/platforms
If you have the time and desire, no reason to not give it a try.
-
I guess this is fundamentally a BSD question, but I know almost nothing about BSD. If someone has a successful pfSense deployment on a PPC or SPARC machine, I'd love to know. I'm thinking G5 Macintosh, POWER4, SPARC64 or newer chips.
no. maybe ARM someday soon, but not SPARC (or PPC).
-
@mer:
One mans bonkers is another mans interesting experiment/mountain to climb :)
FreeBSD has been x86/amd64 as the primary platforms for a long time. PowerPC has traction in the mailing lists, as do ARM and SPARC (SPARC is up and down). x86/amd64 are Tier 1 platforms (fully supported), PPC, SPARC64, ARM are Tier 2, so I'm guessing it may be a good bit of effort to get pfSense up and running on your specific hardware. I'm guessing you'd get very familiar with the pfSense build process.
https://www.freebsd.org/platforms
If you have the time and desire, no reason to not give it a try.
pfSense is my first contact with FreeBSD. I assumed (wrongly) that it had the biodiversity and broad-mindedness that the Linux community has. The more I read about it here and on BSD fora, the less I understand its continued existence.
-
@mer:
One mans bonkers is another mans interesting experiment/mountain to climb :)
FreeBSD has been x86/amd64 as the primary platforms for a long time. PowerPC has traction in the mailing lists, as do ARM and SPARC (SPARC is up and down). x86/amd64 are Tier 1 platforms (fully supported), PPC, SPARC64, ARM are Tier 2, so I'm guessing it may be a good bit of effort to get pfSense up and running on your specific hardware. I'm guessing you'd get very familiar with the pfSense build process.
https://www.freebsd.org/platforms
If you have the time and desire, no reason to not give it a try.
pfSense is my first contact with FreeBSD. I assumed (wrongly) that it had the biodiversity and broad-mindedness that the Linux community has. The more I read about it here and on BSD fora, the less I understand its continued existence.
FreeBSD supported platforms include: i386 (Tier 1), amd64 (Tier 1), ARM (Tier 2), MIPS (Tier 3), pc98 (Tier 2), PPC (Tier 2), Sparc64 (Tier 2) and xbox (N/A). Support has ended for alpha (was tier 4) and ia64 (was tier 2).
pfSense has run on arm, but I'm not ready to release it for arm.
Someone might take the pfSense source code and make it run on a platform such as arm, SPARC or MIPS, but the result will not be "pfSense".
Linux and FreeBSD have different reasons for their existence and relative success.
pfSense has run on