I’m planning out a proxmox box with an OPNsense VM for an upcoming build. I want to consolidate multiple little boxes into one more capable device.
I was planning on using a dual port NIC that I would passthru to the OPNsense VM. I like the idea of the WAN interface being piped directly to the VM rather than passing through the host and being presented as a virtual device. But that means BSD has to play nice with it and as I understand it, BSD network drivers can be temperamental and intel’s drivers are just better.
I was looking at using a cheap dual port intel 226v NIC for this, but intel’s not in a great place right now so I’d like to consider other options. Everywhere online, people scream “only use intel NICs for this” but I find it ridiculous that in 2025, nobody else has managed to make stable drivers for their hardware in this use case.
What are your experiences with non-intel NICs in OPNsense?
If you end up going with Intel anyway, avoid I219-LM (e.g. IBM I340-T2), it has issues where you need to run some commands on startup to disable some of the NIC’s features so that it doesn’t lose connection for a few m every few days. It’s pretty old so you probably won’t end up using it, but just putting it out here.