Proxmox>OPNSense w/ X550-T2 virtualized nic/bridge

[Southpawtechie]

UPDATE: SOLVED

Good day All,

Looking to run this over with you all as I can't seem to locate a direct answer/solution to this issue, or some of the answers are from a few years ago.

Current hardware setup: Netgear C3000 > Dell Optiplex 7020sff (4570) > Proxmox 8.2.7 > OPNSense 24.7 (virtualized) > (newly acquired) X550-T2 rev. 1 (currently virtualized nics in Proxmox).

I have multigig ethernet with Xfinity with a Netgear C3000 modem. The modem says it is doing multigig which I have no reason to suspect otherwise. I have installed the newly acquired X550-T2 in the machine and, in this instance, virtualized the nics into the OPNSense vm. OPNSense speedtest plugin will not get north of 1gb (usually around 9xx Mbps). I do have a 2.5gbps switch but I can't imagine this is the issue as the speedtest in OPNSense out the WAN port doesn't touch the switch.

Checking ethtool on the nic says that it is capable of all speeds up to 10gbps, including 2.5, and 5gbps (this was already known) but only advertising up to 100mbps, 1000mbps, 10000mbps, not 2500mbps or 5000mbps. I've found some users here have provided a script to enable the 2500mbps auto-negotiating, but this doesn't appear to be working.

Most of the previous information I have found people have dealt with already, however the following is what I can't pinpoint an answer to:

1a. Most of the answers about setting the speed of the interface manually in OPNSense don't reference having the nics virtualized. Is it possible to set the speed of the nic manually when it is virtualized? (My brain tells me no as OPNSense doesn't have direct access to it.)

1b. Should I change the virtualized nics to PCI Passthrough? I tried this by creating another OPNSense VM but it didn't seem to want to pickup the WAN address.

2. It is my understanding that at one point Intel and the X550-T2 did not support NBase-T (2.5gbps, 5gbps) on FreeBSD (OPNSense) - is this still the case?

3. In Proxmox how do/can I get the nic to advertise 2500mbps and 5000mbp