OPNsense
Given the Linux bridge and QEMU KVM pass-through performance hit, I tried to install OPNsense (based off FreeBSD) and attempted to dual-boot.
Why OPNsense? That was the main reason I originally bought this C3758R unit in the first place – attempting to see if higher performance-to-power efficiency could be achieved with Intel QAT – pfSense’s QAT libraries are only available in their subscription-based pfSense+ product.
In short: a f*cking huge mess…
- install using custom (not “Auto”) partitioning
- the installer was UEFI-compatible so managed to find and write its bootloader into the FAT32 EFI partition – since the Ubuntu bootloader mounts the EFI System Partition (aka “ESP”) as
/boot/efi, the full path in Ubuntu was/boot/efi/EFI/freebsd/loader.efi - but GRUB wasn’t updated, so edit grub:
/etc/grub.d/40_custom:
menuentry "OPNsense" {
insmod ufs2
insmod zfs
set root=(hd0,gpt4)
chainload (hd0,gpt1)/EFI/freebsd/loader.efi
}
-
-
- changing “gptN” to whatever you see as the correct partition when doing an “
ls -l” in grub, where the root is the FreeBSD UFS/ZFS partition, and thechainloaderis pointing to the ESP - removing one of the two insmod lines where not required (i.e. FreeBSD root is UFS or ZFS formatted)
- changing “gptN” to whatever you see as the correct partition when doing an “
- run
update-grub
-
- install the MOK using the UEFI firmware (i.e. the
/EFI/freebsd/loader.efifile) – otherwise secure boot would prevent the FreeBSD bootloader from working
That fixed, things went from bad to worse…
