fpSense uses the FreeBSD development branch, which was never intended for production use. The OpenSSL3 transition is currently happining there, so there *will* be some breakage and fallout until the code freeze for 14.0-RELEASE!
They also have a bad history of using unofficial/beta drivers which caused problems and were blamed on FreeBSD...
If you have to use one of those bastardized FreeBSD-variants, at least use OPNSense - they use a true vanilla FreeBSD RELEASE-version underneath and add their stuff on top (which you will constantly fight against if you want to do anything the normal way but not intended by the GUI).
Best solution: use vanilla FreeBSD or OpenBSD for a PF firewall. In case of problems or hardware incompatibilities you will get much better and direct support from developers. Also security patches are available right away.
RE i226: this chipset isn't supported yet by FreeBSD or OpenBSD, primarily because this is a low-end consumer product and doesn't get much support from intel either apart from windows. The i225-V variants are mostly supported by now (igc driver), except for some weird, custom OEM variants that surface on some cheap mainboards every now and then. Usually they work fine with the default driver as soon as their HW-IDs are added (same as with e.g. i219-V).
I'm running several Topton appliances with i225 chipsets with OpenBSD (since 7.1) and FreeBSD since 13.0-RELEASE and they work fine. IIRC LRO is buggy (as on many desktop chipsets) in combination with VLAN, at least I have it explicitly disabled on those machines, so it must have caused some issues.
