Confirmed: Kernel Panics Caused by having VLANs Enabled

[tuaris]

As an experiment (after growing frustrated with the kernel panics) I removed the VLAN interfaces from my main OPNSense appliance.  It's been 1 week since I've done that and I am no longer seeing kernel panics that would occur between multiple times a day and every other day.

Hopefully this new information will help you guys track down the bug and solve it.  Until then, I will need to revert back to using something else as my main firewall (smallwall/t1n1wall) since VLAN's are critical for my use case. 

Thid is not to say I am giving up on OPNSense.  I do continue to plan on using ONPSense for other parts of my infrastructure as the primary choice for a router/firewall appliance.  In fact I have 4 other appliances that are doing the job just fine and expect to soon replace a pFsense appliance with an OPNSense one.

[mibsy]

I'm not by any means an expert, but I did want to ask what hardware are you running for the network interfaces? The only reason I ask is because I switched to Intel a while back and they have been solid for me. My previous set-up utilized Realtek NICs and they did not handle VLANs, TCP Checksum Offload, etc. very well and caused instability. It may not apply to your situation, but thought I'd ask since I'm using VLANs and haven't had any Kernel Panic issues.

[tuaris]

This problem was occurring on both a Sokeris net6501 and the PC Engines apu2 platform.

[mibsy]

Cool! My first firewall was a PC Engines and my second was a Soekris (it was a lower end unit). The PC Engines apu2 appears to use Intel, while the Soekris seems to depend upon what mini-PCI Express card you put in the box. I liked the reliability of the Soekris a lot, but it was too underpowered for what I needed and I had to upgrade.

Have you tried sending syslog to an external server to see if you can get any ideas as to what may be causing it?