Re: Shopping for low-power ARM firewall SBC

[Jesse Off <joff%embeddedARM.com@localhost>]

Anders Lindgren wrote:
>   I am looking for a low-power, preferrably-pc104-form-factor (or 
> thereabouts) dual ethernet SBC type of ARM board with a CF slot for 
> building a custom NetBSD firewall thingy.
>
>   http://www.embeddedsys.com/subpages/products/sbc1625.shtml looks 
> like a great match (although I am not sure it will run NetBSD out of 
> the box; the CPU looks like it's supported, and it comes with RedBoot) 
> but it turned out to be prohibitively expensive in single units.
>
>   I've also been looking at 
> http://www.embeddedarm.com/products/board-detail.php?product=TS-7300 
> which really has more features than I need, but a more attractive 
> price. However, it doesn't have CF unless you buy a pc104 addon 
> separately, but then the form factors differ. It only does SD, and I'm 
> not sure it's even possible to support it in NetBSD (it ships as a 
> blob driver in Lignux IIUC).
I've since released the source of that binary-blob SD driver.  The guts 
of the SD access are abstracted in a OS-independent sdcore2.c API with 
api calls sdreset(), sdread(), and sdwrite().  
ftp://ftp.embeddedARM.com/ts-arm-sbc/ts-7500/sources/sdcore2.c

I did successfully write a SD card driver using this source back in 2006 
(before we released sdcore2.c openly) on a TS-7260, but I've since lost 
it. 

I really do wish we had better NetBSD support for all our boards.

//Jesse Off