I am very interested in understanding the field of hardware compatibility with the firewall. How am I supposed to know if a particular piece of hardware will be compatible with the firewall? There are millions of computers and devices on which the firewall can be run, and in general operating systems such as Linux or Windows, etc.
Is there a way to know if a specific piece of hardware will be compatible with the firewall without asking here ? Will the firewall have all the drivers for all hardware vendors ?
Are there any firewall developers here who can answer?
Currently, I am interested in buying a Gigabyte Brix Barebone BSRE-1505
with an AMD Ryzen Embedded R1505G Dual Cores Processor
and it should run the firewall. Is this device compatible?
The only way to be 100% certain that 100% of the IPFire functions would run on a particular hardware would be to purchase an IPFire appliance from Lightning Wire Labs.
OTOH, virtually any PC having a 64-bit AMD or Intel processor, as well as two Ethernet interfaces should run IPFire. A possible incompatibility is the WiFi chip. If WiFi is needed in that situation, then a third Ethernet interface and separate WAP would be required.
If you have any unused 64-bit PC then do a trial installation of IPFire, that takes only about 20 minutes.
A Ryzen R1505G might be an over-kill, depending on what Internet speed you have and what IPFire options you plan deploying.
Exactly. And we cannot test all of them, and neither do we control the drivers that are going into the Linux kernel. They may indeed vary very much on their support and quality.
IPFire will run on pretty much anything that is supported by Linux, but your mileage may vary. Not every system is designed to be a 24/7 packet pushing machine. A lot has to go right to achieve the maximum with as little expense and running costs.
Our own appliances are well tested and we will guarantee that IPFire performs absolutely best on them.
After this segue from the developers and sellers of Ligthing Wire Labs appliances….
Look for a lspci and lsusb output of that system/device mainboard and take note of the devices available. On the IPfire Blog you can look for the latest kernel delivered into lates CU release notes.
Then you can look for eventual issues or driver necessities of your device compared to the Kernel; some might be not necessary at all.
Key part are network adapters (and Realtek NICs are not bad, but also not that good in terms of offloading) and chipset; usually storage is far from being an hassle and consider disabling eventually unnecessary peripherals from UEFI/BIOS.
For being a 24/7 packet pushing machine in my opinion is not that a big of a deal most of times. Is not that uncommon to have a bit oversized hardware for avoiding the necessity of constant upgrade, and being so well designed as system delivers when packets par watt delivered become a meaninful metric for the environment.
I am very interested in understanding the field of hardware compatibility with the firewall. How am I supposed to know if a particular piece of hardware will be compatible with the firewall?
Install it, if it works all good.
If it does not work… you get brownie points for making it work.
Your Gigabyte Brix BSRE-1505 should be compatible with most firewall OSes. It has a 64-bit AMD Ryzen R1505G and two Ethernet ports, which are the main requirements. Just double-check that the NICs are supported by your chosen firewall, and consider testing with a live USB before full installation.
