UDM Pro and Untangle

Good morning everyone,

I just got done watching the video on the new update and I had a random off the wall question: Can you install Untangle or PFsense on the UDM Pro? Is it possible to flash it to one of those? I like the appearance of the UDM Pro, but ya know security is average and then the lack of VPN support. What do you all think?

The UDM-Pro uses an ARM64 CPU from Annapurna Labs, now owned by Amazon. Both Ubiquiti and Mikrotik, who also uses this CPU in some routers, will provide you with the headers and sources required to compile the Linux kernel for it, per the requirements of the kernel license, but there’s a lot of supporting software in the OS that is closed source you would have to recreate.

Untangle only supports x86/x86-64. Even if you got the OS (based on CentOS 7 I believe) to run, the UVM (Untangle Virtual Machine) that does the actual packet processing would never run.

PFSense only supports ARM/ARM64 on their own hardware, and again keep some of their supporting parts of the OS closed source (PFSense as an open source project is only the x86/x86-64 part). Also, PFSense is based on BSD, not Linux, so having Linux kernel sources doesn’t help you very much without being a kernel developer.

Your best bet for an alternative OS is OpenWRT, but at present I don’t think they’ve gotten any public headway on any Annapurna CPUs, mostly because of lack of interest.

Even if you got an alternative OS running on the CPU and able to handle the directly connected interfaces, the gigabit ethernet LAN ports would be an issue. Those are connected to a switch chip which then has a 1Gb connection the CPU. In other words, the CPU only has 4 actual interfaces. See the diagram on this page: products:unifi:unifi_dream_machine_pro [Ubiquiti Community Wiki] The switch chip has to be programmed via something like I2C from the CPU on every bootup. PFSense and OpenWRT handle this type of task on some hardware, but would need a driver, for lack of a better word, to know how to communicate with this switch chip if you wanted VLANs on it.

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