I recently chatted with a hardware OEM insider, and there were a few nuggets of information I felt were worth (
carefully) passing on to the OPNsense community. For privacy reasons – and out of sheer appreciation for an OEM insider opening up to consumers – I will not be disclosing the source of the comments and I have redacted anything possibly identifying. Otherwise the remarks are unadulterated.
QuoteFreeBSD added the ixgbe driver like 3-4 months ago so it is in FreeBSD 15. [personal stuff – red.] OPNsense already backported it to FreeBSD 14.3 so they have it! Good for them. I really like those guys. It doesn't appear to be "production stable" so we won't touch it until it's kernel native. And it looks like Beelink owners already discovered firmware recovery mode instabilities, thermal/firmware mismatches (NVM 1.10 vs 1.30) and Intel is just screaming "It's the OEMs!" so the E610-XT2 sounds like it's not off to a good start. I will say this, the X710s have never once locked up and required a CMOS reset or died and we have [a large sample size in the field to be able to say this with confidence – red.]. Same with our SFPs. Never had to RMA a single one.
Still, our [management – red.] and I have been talking about getting the E610s [into our products – red.] for months and we have a first run concept [product – red.] with them on the way but to go from zero to production with [multiple component – red.] qualification takes 6+ months without any major roadblocks. We have to know the new [product – red.] runs perfectly in our tests before we release it with a [warranty – red.].
Kudos to the OPNsense team for placing the new E610 integration so high on the priority list. That's the kind of thing that demonstrates leadership to OEMs and consumers alike.