When will pfsense 2.2-RELEASE happen?

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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pfSense 2.2 Release Candidate is out now.

I mention a lot about the Hyper-V setup in that piece. It is absolutely awesome if anyone is looking for a home use setup. Configuration issue? Revert in 60 seconds before the wife notices. Things go REALLY bad? Keep a second copy on a Windows 8.1 workstation that you can spin up quickly and restore normal routing functions (note, you may have to change an Ethernet cable for this to work.)

This is going to be an awesome release for folks looking to downsize their firewalls.
 

RTM

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Jan 26, 2014
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As soon as my exams are over, I will be installing this on my new shiny AIMB-272 boxes (if I can get the second board to boot that is), it will be awesome :cool:
 

Rain

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May 13, 2013
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I hope this fixes the strange IPv6 routing problem I've had with pfSense. I think FreeBSD 8 was the culprit. After some random number of days (3-7, on average) pfSense 2.1.x will just randomly stop routing IPv6 packets and require a reboot. I've tried to figure out the problem and resolve it manually in the shell, but nothing fixes it. tcpdump confirms that the system is ingesting IPv6 packets (on both the WAN and LAN side), but nothing happens... Might have to do with using HE.net's tunnelbroker in a GIF tunnel...

Time to put 2.2 in a VM to test this out! If 2.2 doesn't fix it, I'm probably going to learn pf and roll my own FreeBSD-based router.
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Try using the latest RC. The alpha build was not great with ipv6 when I tried it. I think that's one of the reasons they made so many under the hood changes.
 

Rain

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May 13, 2013
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Try using the latest RC. The alpha build was not great with ipv6 when I tried it. I think that's one of the reasons they made so many under the hood changes.
Yep. I installed it in a VM last night. I can't say for sure that the IPv6 issue I was having has been fixed in FreeBSD 10.x, but so far so good. I'll report back after running it for a week or so (or sooner, if it fails sooner).
 

Pri

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Jul 30, 2014
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I'm really looking forward to building one of these for my home network. I just wish there was benchmarks showing how much traffic PFSense can route on different hardware. There is literally nothing out there that benchmarks it across a range of common hardware.

Maybe something you could do Patrick in the future? I'm sure that would get a lot of interest.
 

Patrick

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I'm really looking forward to building one of these for my home network. I just wish there was benchmarks showing how much traffic PFSense can route on different hardware. There is literally nothing out there that benchmarks it across a range of common hardware.

Maybe something you could do Patrick in the future? I'm sure that would get a lot of interest.
I would love to do something like that. My big blockage is that it requires a new set of benchmarks for the site. If folks had a suggestion on the methodology, I could run the tests though.
 

Pri

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Jul 30, 2014
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Maybe a mix of iperf, one strong server with a bunch of VM's doing actions repeatedly. I know anandtech has a piece of software they use for measuring NAS performance that replicates hundreds of clients accessing files over a network.

Perhaps comparison between different NIC's under PFSense too, like Intel and Realtek. See what the large and small packet performance is like, UDP and TCP tests with iperf etc

Maybe also a 10Gb ethernet comparison as they are becoming popular now too. In UK they got a twin port 10Gb/s intel card for £320 now. By no means cheap but affordable enough to find its way in some home setups especially if someone is going to the expense of building a PFSense system.
 

Pri

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Jul 30, 2014
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Also just whilst I remember. I'd also like to see how core counts affect PFSense. Is it better to have a Core i3 at 3.3GHz or a 2.0GHz 8 core Atom board? The prices are similar but the upgrade options are different and board features also differ. There is talk about the Avaton platform having AES acceleration utilised in PFSense 2.2 for VPN and I'd love to see how that compares on the traditional socketed intel platforms like 1150 and the Atom systems with 8 cores.
 
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Mike

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May 29, 2012
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Also just whilst I remember. I'd also like to see how core counts affect PFSense. Is it better to have a Core i3 at 3.3GHz or a 2.0GHz 8 core Atom board? The prices are similar but the upgrade options are different and board features also differ. There is talk about the Avaton platform having AES acceleration utilised in PFSense 2.2 for VPN and I'd love to see how that compares on the traditional socketed intel platforms like 1150 and the Atom systems with 8 cores.
Recent builds of PF may be able to somewhat leverage multiple cores for forwarding. To what extend this works in Pfsense, with address translation and if it was a bottleneck to begin with in your setup remains a question.
[CFT] SMP-friendly pf
Also the I3 is faster clock for clock anyway.

I would like to see performance figures of virtualised routers on different platforms.
 

Pri

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I know the i3 is faster clock for clock. But it only has two cores. So my curiosity is whether it's better to have two very fast cores or 8 slower ones when it comes to PFSense.

Thanks for the link I'll check that out.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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I know the i3 is faster clock for clock. But it only has two cores. So my curiosity is whether it's better to have two very fast cores or 8 slower ones when it comes to PFSense.
That's a fair question, but since pfsense is a fairly lightweight application to begin with I'd perhaps restate it:

Is it better to have 2 modestly fast cores or 8 really slow, low power ones? In other words - there is little/no reason to use "hot" processors for this - but would 8 modest cores help?

Also, there is the question of threads: how effectively does pfsense work with hyperthreading? Is it better to have a 4c/4t cpu with four real cores vs a 2c/4t processor?

Seems to me that pfsense would be ideal on low-scale multi-core CPUs like the Bay Trail J1900 (4c/4t @ 2.00Ghz) or the Avoton/Rangerly Atoms (4c/4t @ 2.4 Ghz or 8c/8t @ 2.4Ghz).
 

J-san

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Nov 27, 2014
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I wonder what kind of performance you can get out PFSense if you passthrough a SR-IOV network card? With PFSense it's pretty easy to backup the config so you wouldn't loose much by giving up snapshots.
 

Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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Just a bit of perspective. I am looking at the dashboard now. 50mbps down, 3mbps up. Currently using ~8% CPU on the C2550 Hyper-V VM (pfsense 2.2-RC)

The new Avoton/ Rangely chips with pfsense handle my home internet line without issue and 50mbps is fast enough even for the colo. The colo ones are bare metal not virtualized at this time.
 

Rain

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May 13, 2013
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I can confirm that the 2.2RC is much more stable when it comes to IPv6! The issue I mentioned above seems to be resolved (likely because they're using FreeBSD 10 now).
 
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weust

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Aug 15, 2014
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Back in September when my Soekris net6501-30 died, I did a few weeks of playing with Hyper-V 2012 R2 and pfSense.
CPU is a i7-4770something. Yes, I know, can't really compare the i7 to a i3 or Atom 2758.
I gave the VM running pfSense two cores, and when downloading at 180 Mbit/s there wasn't a huge load.

No idea anymore what utilization was specifically anymore, but I believe the 2758 will handle my connection easily.
My 600 Mhz Soekris with 1 core and HT can, so the 2758 with two cores shouldn't break sweat at all.
The Soekris tends to get around 90% while downloading at my max speed.

For my simple home use the 2758 will do great.
 
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