This page will give you more insight about which hardware requirements are needed and why. You can built highly customized systems as IPFire scales from very small boards to huge machines depending on the workload you expect.

Processor Architecture

x86_64

From 2022, IPFire requires a x86_64 CPU. It is recommended that a 1 GHz processor or faster is used.

ARM

Since IPFire 2.9 some ARM single board computers are supported. Please check out the ARM section on this wiki. IPFire also supports EFI-enabled 64 bit ARM systems.

Formerly Supported Architectures

32-bit x86 platforms are no longer supported. 32-bit ARM platforms are no longer supported.

Memory

The developers recommend at least 1GB. If various add-ons are used, the amount of memory should be even higher. Memory consuming features/add-ons are the web proxy and URL filter as well as the Intrusion Detection/Prevention System .

Mass storage

Mass storages devices typically have a lot of capacity. They could serve as media for backups or mass data storage with low access times. In IPFire different types of mass storage can be used.

Drives

Although the base system of IPFire requires only a couple of hundreds of megabytes for program data, the minimum amount of storage is 2GB. The developers recommend at least 4GB for log files and add-on packages.

IPFire supports drives of 3 TB and larger with IDE, SATA and SCSI. Most hardware RAID controllers are supported, too.

Networking

IPFire needs at least two network adapters (see Network topologies and access methods). The vast majority of Ethernet network adapters on the market works very well. Adapters with 10MBit/s and ISA connector are not supported any more. Also not all adapters with 10GBit/s are working.