[pfsense without nic passthrough - Issues.]

On 1/16/2020 at 6:49 PM, PeteUnraid said:

Hi

 

I have been working on this also for a while. A totally virtualised pfsense VM running on unraid. In the end I could eventually tweak the performance to be able to get approx 150mb/s passthrough on the NICS but CPU would max out on an intel I5. I worked long and hard but eventually found the incompatibility of pfsense to work with the bro interface NICS under virtio to be the big issue.

 

I finally decided to change pfsense to opnsense and retest as that project fork seems to have better compatability with the NIC drivers (and seems pretty much identical to pfsense). On that VM I setup 2 br0 interfaces using virtio (basically you dont need to edit the xml just use the gui) and set the machine to i440fx-4.2 (latest) with seabios. Im on unraid 6.8.1 and also set the primary disk to virtio before installation rather than leaving it on IDE. During install of opnsense I set it to use legacy boot (MBR) rather than secure boot and installed. Without any changes I can get the full speed now on the NICS and in addition the CPU is low during time of high activity. I believe that PFsense is just struggling with incompatible drivers for virtualisation on QEMU, while OPNSense has them out the box. It might be possible to fix pfsense if you wanted to use that (adding better drivers somehow?), but in my case I was happy to just change over to this fork of the project and use it instead.

 

Hopefully this information can help you, sorry its a few months late, but I only started setting my one up in December and its taken me this long to find a workaround and then test it in production.

 

Pete

Thanks allot for your research, This has solved 2 days of trial error. Opensense works great! 
When i was using virtual pf, I wouldn't get past 100 mbps. Almost started blaming my network card, until I found this thread.