ARM

IPFire is a versatile firewall distribution that is also running on the ARM architecture. However, the ARM architecture is very much different from x86 hardware that many people are used to. This section on the IPFire wiki takes care about which hardware is supported.

What to buy?

Before buying the first ARM single board computer, please take a moment to find out which one is actually supported by IPFire. Note that ARM support is difficult to handle and very fragile. It may require at least some advanced skills with IPFire and/or Linux.

Known Problems affecting all ARM boards

There are some problems which are affecting all ARM boards. Most of them are bugs which are known to the developers, but require special effort to be fixed or cannot be eliminated for another reason.

Please check out the following list of bugs before reporting a new bug in the bug tracker or the forum.

HWRNG not recognized

Some ARM boards (not all, but some of them) have a hardware-based random number generator (HWRNG). IPFire neither recognizes nor uses them at the moment; in addition to that, they don't appear in the list of supported HWRNGs.

Only the Raspberry Pi has an HWRNG which is used and recognized at the moment. For further details, please see the individual descriptions of the ARM boards.

Single Board Computers

CompuLab
██	Trimslice
██	CompuLab Utilite	Missing bootloader & kernel support
██	CompuLab Utilite2
Globalscale Technologies
██	Globalscale Dreamplug	wlan/bluetooth not work w/ IPFire 2.21
██	Globalscale SheevaPlug
██	Globalscale Mirabox	Not sure if IPFire 2.21 will work
IOMEGA
██	Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station
Lamobo
██	Lamobo R1 aka BananaPi Router
LeMaker
██	LeMaker BananaPi
██	LeMaker BananaPro
Raidsonic
██	Raidsonic ICY-Box 62x0
Raspberry Pi Foundation
██	Raspberry Pi (One) B and B+
██	Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
██	Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
██	Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+
Sinovoip
██	BananaPi M1	Sinoviop has mfg the boards for LeMaker
██	BananaPi M2
██	BananaPi M3
SolidRun
██	ClearFog Base	Needs extra u-boot & u-boot env settings.
██	ClearFog Base	Should work like ClearFog Base - no reports
██	CuBox-i	No working bootloader.
██	Hummingboard	No working bootloader.
Wandboard
██	Wandboard Solo	HWRNG not supported yet.
██	Wandboard Dual	WLAN, Bluetooth & HWRNG not supported
██	Wandboard Quad	WLAN, Bluetooth & HWRNG not supported
Others
██	Pandaboard
██	Cubietruck	Various problems.

 

Legend

• ██ - Very well supported.
• ██ - Basic support. Various drivers may be missing, unstable or not working.
• ██ - Does not work.
• ██ - Does not work and no support planned.

Development

There is a mailing list which is the first place to contact other people working on the ARM port of IPFire or being interested in supporting that at: sig-arm@lists.ipfire.org