That router uses as CPU a Cavium Octeon processor (MIPS architecture) with two cores. It supports MIPS 64 r2 and aligned data access, and it is a great platform for running big-endian unit tests.
It boots from a internal USB drive, that can be removed and changed (the only problem is that not all drives are compatible, and also, in most cases you will have to the pendrive in order to use it, not a problem).
I bought it not long ago for doing big endian on both 32 and 64 bit modes, and I can not be more happy. Amazing stuff. My intention was to put directly OpenBSD, but the default Linux distribution it uses (Vyatta, Debian derivative) works very well, being able to install packages via apt-get, so I use it too. To be able to run OpenBSD just changing the USB stick is amazing, and great for testing without spending lots of money on more expensive stuff (e.g. while there are many affordable, and quite good, routers with fast single-core MIPS 24K and 74K -e.g. TP Link-, usually have small flash disk (4-16MB) and low RAM (16-64MB), having to use remote filesystems or cross compiling; with the EdgeRouter Lite you can build and run, without worrying with cross compilers nor remote filesystems).
Amazing hardware: USB boot means no device brick risk, multiple OS boot. Also, is very stable, no matter if it gets a bit hot, I had 0 hangs since I bought many months ago. Despite being not cheap, compared to other domestic equipment, it is worth it every cent it costs. In my opinion.
P.S. As contrast, another device I use for unit testing, a GuruPlug (ARMv5), has the risk of being bricked, make me being afraid of installing anything not really necessary (the point of using an ARMv5 instead of an ARMv6 like Raspberry Pi, is that the Pi supports unaligned memory access, so if you want to check those cases, you can't).
It's probably much too late for this to be helpful, but the issue with not all flash drives being compatible is because that version of uboot would probe for USB devices very early on and it doesn't probe again if it doesn't find anything. Changing bootdelay won't fix that because that happens afterwards. It can boot from practically any flash drive if you prepend "usb reset;" to bootcmd and then do a saveenv. Be careful when doing this, all of that configuration isn't stored on the flash drive obviously so if you aren't comfortable with uboot you can easily brick the router. Just do a printenv first and make sure to copy down the old bootcmd just in case you need it to recover.
Thank you for the explanation. That is not really a problem, as there is information about drives known to work (you can reach it e.g. via Google). Also, USB pendrives are cheap, so just trying with pendrives you already have it is probable you find many already working properly.
"Do you use the router features as well, or do use it only as a mini computer for testing?"
Given that the ERL requires a blob to use the hardware offload features of the Octeon (without which routing and firewalling performance is reduced by a factor of 10 to 20), one would expect that using the thing as a router while running OpenBSD would give you -at best- 100mbit/s throughput.
Does that match your experience, or are you not really using it as a gigabit router, or am I woefully misinformed?
[0] According to his comment history, it looks like he's being shadowbanned, but I can't figure out why.
Sure! As router as well, simultaneously. I access via ssh, having repositories inside, doing pulls, builds, etc. Is just like any other machine (in that router you can run at least Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD). Network performance is great. I use two ports for two internal networks (through a gigabit switch in one port, and the second usually used only for specific experiments), and the third one for the WAN access.
Hardware is fast: two 500MHz MIPS64 CPUs with 512MB of RAM (Cavium CN5020, 128KB L2 cache, 64-bit memory transfers are faster than twice as fast as 32-bit ones), each of one doing 2 instructions per cycle (4 instruction per cycle, counting both CPUs). The only notable downside is not having hardware floating point support (software doing extensive floating point usage will run slow).
The device has hardware packet and cryptographic acceleration. In the Linux case is able to fill gigabit links (manufacturer claims 1 million packet per second -I haven't pushed it that far-), and also some features are available on FreeBSD (e.g. hardware crypto, but not packet acceleration, if I recall correctly), and few/none (?) on OpenBSD (uses only one half of the RAM and just one CPU).
It boots from a internal USB drive, that can be removed and changed (the only problem is that not all drives are compatible, and also, in most cases you will have to the pendrive in order to use it, not a problem).
I bought it not long ago for doing big endian on both 32 and 64 bit modes, and I can not be more happy. Amazing stuff. My intention was to put directly OpenBSD, but the default Linux distribution it uses (Vyatta, Debian derivative) works very well, being able to install packages via apt-get, so I use it too. To be able to run OpenBSD just changing the USB stick is amazing, and great for testing without spending lots of money on more expensive stuff (e.g. while there are many affordable, and quite good, routers with fast single-core MIPS 24K and 74K -e.g. TP Link-, usually have small flash disk (4-16MB) and low RAM (16-64MB), having to use remote filesystems or cross compiling; with the EdgeRouter Lite you can build and run, without worrying with cross compilers nor remote filesystems).
Amazing hardware: USB boot means no device brick risk, multiple OS boot. Also, is very stable, no matter if it gets a bit hot, I had 0 hangs since I bought many months ago. Despite being not cheap, compared to other domestic equipment, it is worth it every cent it costs. In my opinion.
P.S. As contrast, another device I use for unit testing, a GuruPlug (ARMv5), has the risk of being bricked, make me being afraid of installing anything not really necessary (the point of using an ARMv5 instead of an ARMv6 like Raspberry Pi, is that the Pi supports unaligned memory access, so if you want to check those cases, you can't).