Realtek RTL8125BG in a firewall?

Networking & Firewalls
1

Does anyone have experience with the Realtek RTL8125BG based quad port cards? I need to build out new hardware for PF/OPN-sense and was wondering how the support for this card might be? Quad 2.5gbps ports makes it attractive.

I know the on board Realtek gigabit chips are not really very well supported and underperform (to be polite).

Looks like with an alternate package it was supported in pf v2.6 and forward.

Also seems to be an optional package from the regular installer in 2.7 and forward.

But is is worth saving $20 over a gigabit Intel i350 (if you only need gigabit)?

2

I always avoid Realtek cards, they are just not good for firewalls.

3

You would think that they would improve… But then again you would think that Broadcom would be better too. Still thinking about recycled i350 vs this Realtek for my lab stuff, thinking about buying 1 or 2 HP T740 for multipurpose low power machines, the processor beats the N100 by a fair amount, probably due to the 8 threads. N305 is getting costly to play around.

4

PFSense does not need a powerful processor, just look at the spec of Netgate devices

New 4200 has 4-core Intel® Atom® C1110 @ 2.1 GHz (w/AVX2 and VAES)

8200 top of the range 8-core Intel® Atom® C3758R @ 2.4 GHz (w/QAT and AES-NI)

5

Found some used Dell i350 cards for a cheap enough price that it just isn’t worth playing with the Realtek cards, 2 cards for less than the price of 1. I’ll let the products and drivers mature before playing with them, everyone is on a 2.5gbps kick so used Realtek cards don’t show up.