Support for mpcie accelerator
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Does pfSense allow the use of a mpcie accelerator ??
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Yes. Potentially.
There's nothing special about mPCIe, it's just a PCIe bus slot. It's limited to 1x (1 lane) compared with a full size card.
But these days a lot of platforms have better acceleration in the CPU than you can achieve in an external card. Moving data across the PCIe bus is, relatively, very slow.
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/cryptographic-accelerators.html
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@stephenw10 I think they are cool to play with, do you recommend any mpcie cryptographic accelerators for state side customers? Maybe one that is built on top of an Intel Optane …. (I am dreaming )
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Not really. Only QAT based devices would really make much sense these days and I don't think I've ever seen one on an mPCIe card.
Back in the day people used to use Hifn cards. But those are pretty much ancient at this point! I believe we removed the drivers since it eventually started causing problems. https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/11426
Though we still build the modules for those if you really wanted to try it.
