@jimp:
TSO and LRO are meant for workstations and servers/appliances, NOT firewalls or routers. Do not uncheck those.
It isn't a FreeBSD thing or a pfSense thing, the fundamental design of LRO is not compatible with routing/firewall roles.
Hmmm, that's good to know. I had no idea, I've always had those two boxes unchecked. For whatever reason I haven't had any issues with it but it seems that it isn't the best/most efficient setup. - Are there any implications other than potentially reduced performance? i.e., since I didn't have any performance issues, is there any other negative impact from having been using these settings such as increased CPU load or anything?
Also, is there any difference how these work in a virtual v physical machine? Or is it purely whether the machine is a client or a router?
@jimp - would it be possible to reword the GUI text on these in 2.4? I also was thrown off by the "broken in some hardware drivers, and may impact performance with some specific NICs" In my opinion this is pretty misleading after having read your above post. It makes it sound like you might have trouble if you happen to have a certain NIC, when in fact it seems that you will be misconfiguring your device if you are using it as a router - which almost everyone here is.
I would suggest something generally along the lines of:
Checking this option will disable hardware TCP segmentation offloading (TSO, TSO4, TSO6). This offloading is broken in some hardware drivers, and may impact performance with some specific NICsintended for machines configured as clients, NOT routers. This will take effect after a machine reboot or re-configure of each interface.
Checking this option will disable hardware large receive offloading (LRO). This offloading is broken in some hardware drivers, and may impact performance with some specific NICsintended for machines configured as clients, NOT routers. This will take effect after a machine reboot or re-configure of each interface.