OpnSense & Modern CPU's (Efficiency & Performance Cores)

[NugentS]

How does Opnsense handle a mix of efficiency and performance cores. For example if PPoE uses a single core I would hate for this to end up on an efficiency core?

Just thinking about a new firewall platform. I'd like both 2.5Gb and 2*SFP+ AND a decent CPU without it turning into a space heater

I have a I7-8565U based unit at the moment. Way more CPU than I need atm - but only has 1Gb NIC's and my local ISP is threatening (at some point in the future) a 2.5Gb upgrade - which is very very shiny as a concept

I also have a AliExpress N100 unit with Intel 2.5Gb (226) NIC's which I tried out yesterday. I do run Suricata. The N100 unit, with an idle(ish) network connection and running suricata was running at 60+% CPU which doesn't bode well for a busy 1Gb, let alone a 2.5Gb connection running hot. All the CPU was suricata, if I disabled that the CPU dropped to not much

[newsense]

The answers lie in FreeBSD land mainly.

Lucky enough FreeBSD 13.3b1 is due out next week, and also 14 is available, so to get a better understanding of what's coming you may want to test drive both on N100 to have a better understanding of what's coming in OPNsense.

It's too early to know what's coming in 24.7, depending on how things work out could be either 13.3 or 14.1