PfSense Software Embraces Change: A Strategic Migration to the Linux Kernel (opens in new tab)

How so?

I ran pfSense ages ago, well before the OPNsense fork, and I'd like to go back to one or the other for my home network but haven't had time to research the current situation. Wouldn't mind hearing from those more familiar.

Yeah, the whole Wireguard nonsense showed that Netgate is not a serious company and that pfSense is not a serious project. It's trash that belongs onto the garbage heap of history.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

this may be related to the performance of the intel nic driver for bsd.

PPPoE is still very common in the UK, even over fibre. I think it’s something to do with allowing multiple providers on the same infra.

The encapsulation requires a lot of CPU power, and on non specialised x86 hardware you end up needing a highly clocked CPU to get gigabit speeds.

OpenWRT is Linux based so has a multithreaded implementation.

My Flint 2 router has some sort of hardware acceleration so hammering a gigabit line shows <1% CPU, leaving lots of overhead for things like Docker.

Many DSL installations use PPPoe, additionally some Fibre installs too.

It's very common in the US for DSL and also some fiber providers.

DSL

their previous April Fools joke (https://www.netgate.com/blog/building-a-behemoth-router) actually said "Happy April Fool's Day" at the end. This doesn't. It's a poor attempt at a joke if it is one.

Yeah, I think this is a joke, but only because it's a big change announced on April 1; it reads pretty serious. Especially the part about how TrueNAS already made the switch - that was my first though on seeing the headline.

There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

[1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

[2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....