But this device doesn’t meet my needs. So i decided to try to put Linux or BSD on it.
Before we can put Linux/BSD on it, we need to take a look at the internals of the TZW. We need to do this because we need to know if the hardware is compatible.
- A overview of the TZW internals:
- 1 Memory
- 2 CPU
The TMPR3927 operates at 133MHz. It has a 32-bit bus and includes a PCI controller, memory controller (SDRAM, ROM, flash, and SRAM), direct memory access controller, timers, UARTs, and I/Os on a single chip. It consumes 1.2W of power at 133MHz and has an operating voltage of 2.5V for internal CPU operation and 3.3V for I/O operations.
And googles says that linux runs on it
- 3 Flash
The flash chip is a TC58FVB321-10 from Toshiba. Which is a 32Mb (4M x 8 bit/2M x 16 bit) flash memory.
- 4 PLD
I am not sure what this exactly is, but i pulled the sticker of it and there is a amtel chip under it. I googled it and found this datasheet about it: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/DOC0403.PDF
- 5 2x Ethernet
The two ethernet chips are intels e100. Which runs well under linux.
- 6 Mini PCI WLAN
The WLAN module is in a mini PCI bus.
I took it out and on the back is a ISL3874AIK chip on it. Which is a Prism 2.5 chipset. And that runs well under linux with the hostap (http://hostap.epitest.fi) drivers.
- 7 SonicWall crypto CPU?
This looks to me like a custom cryto CPU?
- 8 Serial
The sonicwall has a standard serial port. It can be used for a cli and firmware uploads.
So the hardware looks compatible with to run on Linux, except the crypto CPU maybe??? But i can live without it.So I downloaded a firmware image from sonicwall for the TZW and runned hexdump and file on it. But this is all data. Now i am a little but stuck on how to proceed further.
