GPIOs on it8772E chip

[marinaru]

Ah yes, very useful to have access to OW from serial. I did lock myself out a few times and had to reset. Would they interact with eachother when they both boot up? I figure both are loading the eeprom's contents at startup.
I could put freeBSD but at this point I'm pretty happy with the features, especially since I have those GPIOs. I'll focus on the firewall rules for now.

[stephenw10]

That link would be for a FreeBSD image that runs on the TP-Link instread of OpenWRT. You probably don't want to do that!

I would not expect any interaction between the com lines there. There should not be any output on com2 when pfSense is booting. It's never been an issue on that device with the build in switch for example.

I would be very surprised in that header marked 'UART1' is actually connected directly to the eeprom. It's probably connected to the SuperIO chip. Accessing the eeprom would be via an SPI header almost certainly.
I have no way to know that for certain of course!

Edit: Looking again at the photo what's on that 2 pin header just next to the UART1 label? Also it looks like there is something shown as 'SPI1' which I would expect to be for accessing the eeprom.

Steve