32 bits (still) matters!

November 15, 2020 6 minute read

updated @ Mon Nov 16 08:16:30 PM CET 2020: Corrected the version when OPNsense dropped 32 bits support.

I used OPNsense on my pcengines Alix 2d13 firewall.

The Alix 2d13 is a nice motherboard with a Geode CPU 32 bits x86 CPU.

I migrated to OPNsense after pfSense dropped support for 32 bits. Unfortunately, OPNsense also dropped support for 32 bits CPUs in the 19.1.7 release 20.7 release. I decided to install FreeBSD on my Alix to use it as my firewall.

To make it possible to reinstall my Alix firewall, I installed FreeBSD on my Raspberry Pi 2 to use it as my firewall during the installation of FreeBSD on my Alix.

You’ll find my journey to install FreeBSD my an Alix firewall below.

Upgrade FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi 2

November 1, 2020 4 minute read

I recently installed FreeBSD on my raspberry-pi 2 to use it as my firewall.

The FreeBSD version that I installed was a FreeBSD 12.2 Pre-Release. FreeBSD 12.2 has been released this week.

ARM is a Tier-2 on FreeBSD. This means that freebsd-update doesn’t work on a Raspberry Pi.

Freebsd-update wouldn’t work on a Pre-Release anyway. So I was looking for a way to update my Raspberry Pi to FreeBSD 12.2.

Use a raspberry-pi 2 as a firewall with FreeBSD

October 25, 2020 10 minute read

Updated @ Mon Nov 16 08:16:30 PM CET 2020: Corrected the version when OPNsense dropped 32 bits support.

I was using OPNsense on my pcengines alix firewall and was quite happy with it.

The alix 2d13 is a nice motherboard with a Geode CPU, it has a 32 bits x86 instruction set. I migrated to OPNsense from pfSense when pfSense dropped 32 bits support.

Unfortunately, OPNsense also dropped support for 32 bits CPU’s in the 19.1.7 release 20.7 release. I decided to install FreeBSD on the alix to use it as my firewall. But I need a temporary firewall solution so I can install FreeBSD on my alix board. I have a Raspberry PI 2 that I wasn’t using.

You’ll find my journey to use my RPI2 as my firewall below.

Open Hardware PowerPC notebook

August 9, 2020 less than 1 minute read

PowerPC Notebook

I prefer RISC as a CPU architecture over CISC. RISC is a simpler design that should deliver more CPU performance with fewer transistors and is more power-efficient. We have to recognize that Intel and AMD have made great progress in increasing the performance and efficiency of the x86 CISC architecture.

But the x86 architecture comes with a FreeDOM cost, Intel has the Intel Management Engine and closed Proprietary software is required to initialize the components. The same can be said about AMD; AMD has the AMD Platform Security Processor and binary blobs are required.

Power is currently the most powerful alternative that doesn’t require binary blobs; this is not only great for free/open source activists. A truly open-source firmware that can be reviewed / audited is also for nice security reasons.

Keep zfs running on the Raspberry PI

August 3, 2020 less than 1 minute read

I got a Raspberry PI 4 to play with and installed Manjaro GNU/Linux on it.

I use OpenZFS on my PI. The latest kernel update broke zfs on my PI due to a License conflict, the solution is to disable PREEMPT in the kernel config. This BUG was already resolved with OpenZFS with the main Linux kernel tree at least on X86_64/AMD64, not sure why the kernel on the raspberry pi is still affected.

I was looking for an excuse to build a custom kernel for my Pi anyway :-). I cloned the default manjaro RPI4 kernel and disabled PREEMPT in the kernel config.

The package is available at: https://gitlab.com/stafwag/manjaro-linux-rpi4-nopreempt. This package also doesn’t update /boot/config.txt and /boot/cmdline.txt to not overwrite custom settings.

Have fun!