Watchguard M200 firewall appliance: could we run OpenWrt on it?

For Developers
1

Hello all,
I have a couple of Watchguard Firebox M200 firewall appliance lying around after upgrading to newer units.
Could we build an openwrt image for them? It would be fine recycling them as a good router.
AFAIK Openwrt is the only Linux network/firewall distribution supporting power architecture.
Here are the specs. Software image is written on SD card.

Hardware Specifications:
Firebox M200
Processor Freescale T1042
Storage Micro SD 8 GB
Memory: RAM 2GB DDR3L 1600MT/s, 64-bits width,
non-ECC, U-DIMM type

2

In theory, yes - in practice you'd be looking at a lot of work.

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3

Keep an eye on the new qoriq target. I expect M200 support to land there early next year.

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4

Interesting news. I don't have the M200 anymore, but I could retrieve a Watchguard T35, based on NXP T1024, Memory 2 GB, Storage 16 GB mSATA.
Let me know if I can help testing.

5

Once musl is fixed to not hardcode AltiVec instructions on PowerPC64, adding M200 and T35 support shouldn't be too hard. I will not be working on T35 as I do not have the hardware, but you could always give it a go yourself, using the M300 and future M200 commits as example?

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Having a ton of trouble getting it to work via source myself, so I can't wait for it to be officially supported :smiley: I have a stack of M200s and M300s

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Any progress on the musl fix? I have an M200 and would like to get OpenWrt functional on it!

8

Unfortunately I haven't spent time on it anymore. One user on IRC offered to pick this up, but he didn't manage to do so before his holiday period, and I haven't heard from him since.

Aside from that, we also never managed to get the network on the M200 in a working state.

If you want to have a go, you can start from my qoriq-m200 branch. This boots fine, but network doesn't work. See commit messages for some details of what works, and what has been tried. Also check the commit message (in my staging tree) of the musl change I proposed on the musl ML, it contains an important instruction.

We have since also received a GPL drop from WatchGuard.

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So the musl patch still has not been merged? That was my main concern as I don't think I want to attempt this until tools are capable of supporting the SOC. I also have a T35-W with the same SOC as the M200, so was hoping to build on the M200 work. I may take a look during my holiday if I don't get distracted with something else!

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As you can see on the musl ML thread, changes have been requested to the patch. Unfortunately it took me two weeks to come up with those changes, as I had never touched ASM before. From the responses to the patch I understood I still had no idea what I was doing, and as this change was needed for hardware I will most probably never use in production, I decided it's not worth my free time.

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