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driver firmware load would be nice (given the availability of the updater).

I've implemented host boot in my fork.
You'll first need to customize the firmware to have MAC/PHY suitable for your board.
(This is more or less trial and error, unless you're lucky that your board is in the updatedata.xml distributed in OEM firmware update package)
https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/5969424

Then it's quite straight forward (Details in README)
* Package the firmware as a KLD
* Install it
* Enable forced host boot

This is in deed quite a nice feature, as it eliminate the risk of bricking NICs with bad firmware
My NIC came with 1.5.42 which I don't have any problem with though.

Would it be possible to add this function to the driver?

These NIC have DOM, they can measure Temps directly on them.
Linux drivers have these temp measurements.

Thanks for testing it!

I hope I understood your question correctly.
Temperature sensor measurements are exposed through sysctl,
I haven't figured out how these can be wired to OPNsense dashboard though.

root@usb:~ # sysctl -a | grep aq | grep phy_temperature
dev.aq.1.phy_temperature: 46
dev.aq.0.phy_temperature: 42

I've been working on adding aq2 (e.g. aqc113c) support to the abandoned FreeBSD driver.
https://github.com/albb0920/aqtion-freebsd-aq2

The patches are mostly written by LLMs, but it is already quite functional.

If anyone is interested in testing this, here's a guide on how to install on OPNsense
https://github.com/albb0920/aqtion-freebsd-aq2/wiki/OPNsense-Installation-Guide