To start off I’m a networking noob. I’m considering getting a Intel Quick Assist Adapter 8950 to play with and to speed up my VPN. How overkill would this be or would I just be wasting 40w of power for the card?
Since PfSense Plus is available for home users now useful is QAT?
Pfsense 22.01, QAT w/Intel Quick Assist Adapter 8950, PIA OpnVPN, on a 200 Mbit line?
My system:
Pfsense 22.01-RELEASE (amd64)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) Gold G5400T CPU @ 3.10GHz
4 CPUs: 1 package(s) x 2 core(s) x 2 hardware threads
AES-NI CPU Crypto: Yes (active)
QAT Crypto: No
pfSense Plus software:
Support for Intel® QuickAssist Technology, also known as QAT.
QAT accelerates cryptographic and hashing operations on supported hardware, and can be used to accelerate IPsec, OpenVPN, and other OpenCrypto Framework-aware software.
Supported hardware includes many Intel-based systems sold by Netgate (e.g. XG-7100, SG-5100) and add-on cards.
From the FreeBSD man page:
The qat driver supports the QAT devices integrated with Atom C2000 and C3000 and Xeon C620 and D-1500 chipsets, and the Intel QAT Adapter 8950.
It can accelerate AES in CBC, CTR, XTS (except for the C2000) and GCM modes, and can perform authenticated encryption combining the CBC, CTR and XTS modes with SHA1-HMAC and SHA2-HMAC. The qat driver can also compute SHA1 and SHA2 digests.strong text