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 the chainloader is pointing to the ESP
    • removing one of the two insmod lines where not required (i.e. FreeBSD root is UFS or ZFS formatted)
  • run update-grub
• install the MOK using the UEFI firmware (i.e. the /EFI/freebsd/loader.efi file) – otherwise secure boot would prevent the FreeBSD bootloader from working

That fixed, things went from bad to worse…

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