Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Why did you not implement it on your Turris Omnia? If the only problem was software update, you still have great HW platform.


I considered the Turris Omnia, but ultimately decided in favor of the apu2c4. Here’s the comparison I made back then:

Turris Omnia: 209 € (-), built-in SFP (+), UART (-), GOARCH=arm (-)

apu2: 105 € (+), no SFP (-), DB9 serial (+), GOARCH=amd64 (+)

Basically, the apu2 costs half (I now have 3), has a real serial port (now permanently attached to my workstation) and an architecture (amd64) which is closer to what gokrazy already supports (arm64) and more likely to be useful to others — I could find way more suitable (≥ 2 ethernet ports) amd64 boards/mini-PCs than 32-bit arm boards.

Hope that makes sense!

Edit: I do agree that the Turris Omnia is a pretty good platform, though! See https://michael.stapelberg.de/posts/2017-03-25-turris-omnia/ for more thoughts about the device.

The apu2 has all the Omnia has (aside from the built-in SFP), and is well-supported by PC Engines and their vendors. They run coreboot and even sell you recovery SPI flash chips for a few bucks if you want to change coreboot yourself :).


Would it be difficult to port this to other hardware? I would assume there is some HAL? (genuinly curious, have no experience with router sw/fw)


The HAL is Linux in this case, but you might need to send pull requests to enable additional drivers, depending on the hardware.

The currently supported platforms are the Raspberry Pi 3 B, Raspberry Pi 3 B+, the PC Engines apu2c4, and qemu x86-64 (I’ll update gokrazy.org with an overview about this in a minute). As long as your hardware is similar enough to one of these, chances are things just work.

Edit: https://gokrazy.org/platforms.html now describes the support level of the various targets.


I guess that has to do with firmware and schematics not always being available. Current consumer routers often have no or little documentation on the internal workings and some have started to limit functionality if you can't use vendor-signed firmware. On the other hand, as soon as you can run stock linux kernels with reasonable performance, gokrazy becomes possible again.

Edit: I was wrong, the Turris has docs and firmware to play with.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: