Hey folks,
I've been using OPNsense since late last year. It's been nice to use, but when I've wanted to try more complex things that require downloading ports and compiling them, the low-power of the CPU is very noticeable. Is there any way to set up a VM or to target OPNsense on a Windows machine? The idea being that I compile what I need using my laptop's much faster CPU and then just copy over the binaries over for installation and avoid a 5+ hour compile. I guess I could set up something using FreeBSD, but given that OPNsense has its own packages, I'd like to try to find a way to directly target OPNsense.
Cheers!
It depends on what you want to compile and how you want to install it.
Ideally, you would use a FreeBSD VM with the ports tree (https://github.com/opnsense/ports) to compile and package the software. Then you can simply copy the package over and install it with pkg.
If you just want to compile something random, e.g. a Go program or something similar, and don't want/need to install it as a package, you can usually compile it on your existing system with the target OS set to FreeBSD and then just copy the binary over.