Pfsense SG-2440 freezes at random

Got a pfsense SG-2440 send to me, which was working quiet well up until now. The complaint was that it freezes at random with no status led's nor any signs of what had happened in the logs. The device could be rebooted by disconnecting the power and doing a cold boot. So i was interested why this was happening.

I did put it on the bench in the hope it was something obvious like PSU or broken flash. After opening it up nothing obvious could be detected. I could not discover any PSU noise of importance, so i decided to run some more extensive tests (to be continued).

Surfing the net with related problems quickly learned me that this type of problem is quiet common for this unit with this type of cpu.

I discovered that Intel announced in 2018, the arrival of the C0 stepping in a specification update for the Atom C2000. In the modified design, the lpc interface has been modified, which should fix the lpc clock output problems. With the current C2000, that output can stop functioning, causing the entire chip to fail. There is our cute 'little' problem.

Affected products from different vendors Dell, Cisco, HP, Netgear, Seagate, Supermicro en Synology apperently with the same CPU.

However, as the SG-2440 is now declared EOL it is hard or impossible to get updates or fixes.