IPFire on a Netgate SG-1000, as well as concerns, questions and hopes

Getting Started with IPFire
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Hello IPFire community, I come to you bearing questions!

I’ve got an old end-of-life Netgate SG-1000 Router/Firewall that runs PFSense. Given it’s got an ARM processor, and the updates to PFSense failed multiple times, I’m considering a move over to IPFire with it.

My primary concerns, though, are that it’s my sole router at the moment and I’d rather not hose my network.
I’ve checked the documentation regarding the fact that IPFire can be used as a router and firewall, but I wanted to confirm before I installed a potentially incompatible system.

The secondary concern I have is with getting the current eMMC backed up. From my googling, I’ve seen nothing viable. That doesn’t really matter, but if anyone has information regarding it I’d massively appreciate it.

However, a more ideal thing would be to bypass the eMMC entirely and just run IPFire via the SD card. I’ve gotten mixed signals on whether this is possible or ideal. I can imagine it’s probably not the most ideal, but if the installer loads itself into RAM my ideal outcome would to be install it to the same SD card that I loaded it from.

Anyone have any words on these subjects, which specific parts seem a bit too hare-brained to work, et cetera?

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Source

TI AM3352 ARM 600Mhz CPU
512MB DDR3
4GB eMMC
2x 1GbE ports.

Source

Arm CPU 1 Arm Cortex-A8
Arm (max) (MHz) 300, 600, 800, 1000
CPU 32-bit

|Processor |x86_64 or ARM**64** CPU with 1 GHz or better or a supported ARM SBC|
|---|---|
|Memory |1GB or greater|
|Storage |at least 4GB of disk storage|
|Network |at least two Ethernet network adapters|

Source

Discontinued Support for 32-bit ARM

The IPFire Development team will discontinue building for 32-bit ARM (i.e., armv6l) on Feb 28, 2023.

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Ah, drat. I overlooked the memory requirements thinking this thing had at least 1GB. Thanks for the info! Looks like I’ll have to figure out something else for this little guy in the mean time.

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The even more important part is the bitness of the architecture. The 32-bit ARM is simply not supported – in fact, 32-bit is being phased out in many places regardless of architecture (it will be interesting to see how long the Raspberry org can keep their older devices supported).

You can likely run something like Alpine Linux on it and set up your own firewall system. However, it might be more fruitful to buy some x64-compatible small box and start over. Older esoteric micro-computers often have a “use before” date, I have a couple of such devices myself… NatSemi/AMD Geode, anyone? :wink:

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