None of these are as small as *WRT distros and they still to this day only run on x86 and x64, but you get OpenBSD's packet filter (claimed by most to be superior to Linux's) bolted onto FreeBSD (for better hardware support?) and a BSD license if that matters to you.

I actually had missed the news that the M0n0wall project was over. But even if it is, one of its derivatives is pFsense. What is pFsense missing that makes people want to fork M0n0wall?

One thing to compare is the hardware requirements for running OPNsense versus m0n0wall or SmallWall. OPNsense requires essentially a fairly modern computer, whereas I run m0n0wall currently on a 15+ year old 600Mhz P3 (which spends about 90% of its time twiddling its thumbs). I'm guessing that almost no one who was running m0n0wall is able to install OPNsense on the same hardware, as the requirements for OPNsense would be extreme overkill for m0n0wall.

That does bring up an interesting question about the MIXTPC boxes. My understanding is that m0n0wall will only use one core in a multi-core system, a few tens of MB of disk space, only and certainly won't use more than 128MB of ram. The MIXTPC boxes will still work, but even the cheapest one at $250 is way more than you'll need.

Hello,

as announced earlier, the m0n0wall mailing list and forum are now frozen. This is the final message, and I would like to take the opportunity to thank all those who have sent me emails with kind words and expressions of gratitude. They were too numerous for me to reply to individually, but they were all very much appreciated!

There have been some questions on what the way forward is for current m0n0wall users. If you are happy with the current feature set of m0n0wall and just need a security patch, bug fix, hardware compatibility update or minor improvement now and then, there are two nascent projects started by former m0n0wall developers/users that may have something for you: SmallWall and t1n1wall.

For a more feature-rich alternative that is still based on FreeBSD and has the same roots, both pfSense and OPNsense (which is a fork of the former) are excellent choices. They have higher hardware requirements than m0n0wall, but on the other hand, a lot of new embedded hardware has recently become available, with 2 GB or more of memory and 1 GHz or faster CPUs, at a similar price as earlier platforms. It makes sense (pun intended) to use these additional resources - something that m0n0wall hasn't been particularly good at in recent times. Just keep that in mind for your next hardware upgrade.

Farewell, fellow m0n0wall enthusiasts.

- Manuel
28 February 2015