Hardware

The new ALIX Boards are on the way 

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2a.htm

Can't wait to get one

I concur - I have an ALIX1c and it rocks. Wish it had two ethernet ports though!

Any ideas on when? I'm getting antsy.

The ALIX 2A boards are on either their first or second test batch, and barring any unforeseen issues, I would expect them to start doing production runs of the ALIX 1C and 2A within the next month or so.

By the way, the Geode LX used in these boards (as well as the Soekris 5501 I believe) has a built-in RNG and an AES128 security block. I've tested the security block with linux thanks to the OCF port by David McCollough at Secure Computing, and the results are rockin'.

http://ocf-linux.sourceforge.net/

I also did some testing of the VIA C7 padlock via cryptodev and openssl in pfsense and the results were nice but a little confusing. By loading the padlock driver, the speed increased drastically for the cryptodev and dynamic engines, but not nearly as much as for when accessing the padlock engine directly.