Re: anyone ever try OpenBSD on a Geode GX CPU?

[Kevin <kongnamool@yahoo.com>]

Hi Diana,

I have a small design here with a Geode GX 300MHz and
it is a dog.  I have to blame the CPU because it makes
a decent router but when I start encrypting packets it
suddenly runs like molasses (sp?).  I would highly
recommend using an encryption accelerator (as you
indicate you might do) if you do IPSec over your box. 
The design we are using is slightly customized for us
and is a small aluminum box with three Realtek
ethernet and a notebook-style IDE header which we use
a flash card in.  We run the emBSD dist straight from
flash...  Using a memory filesystem is probably a
better way to go.  For kicks, we will be trying this
with an embedded Linux-FreeS/WAN image and see if the
performance is still doggy (seeing if getting rid of
IDE accesses helps any).  Anyone know of an
OpenBSD-based RAMDisk image that compresses to 5-10MB
that is ready to go?  There used to be a dist/file
called kindofblue.tgz somewhere that was a ready
OpenBSD RAMDisk image but I can't seem to find it
anymore. 

For a design similar to the Allwell box, can I
recommend Flytech?  

http://www.flytech.com.tw  

The NC-series boxes are pretty small.  As small or
smaller than the Allwell box you link to and don't
have all the video in-out crap.  Also, you have a
choice of Cyrix?, AMD K-6 or 2nd gen Celeron.  The NC1
or 2 I believe has onboard ethernet and 2 PCI slots. 
The power supply is external (is that the same with
the Allwell box?). I have an NC2 (I think) and it was
working great for a long while as my home OpenBSD
server running Qmail, djbdns and being a kick-ass VPN
(without acceleration I might add).  The onboard
ethernet recently failed, it suddently no longer
exists, but I don't hold that against Flytech. 
Hardware just sucks, period.  We shall see now how
good their techsupport is.


--Kevin




--- Diana Eichert <deichert@wrench.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to make a low power/low noise router and
> I ran across the
> following system.
> 
>
http://www.allwell.tv/Products/Set_Top_Box/set_top_box_0.html
> 
> They use the Geode GX CPU's.  They aren't on the
> i386 hardware page but
> I'm thinking some brave soul out there has tried to
> install OpenBSD on
> one.
> 
> thanks
> 
> diana
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