USB 3.0 Support?
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Hi there,
I'm very new to pfSense so I apologize if this is an awkward, dumb, or already answered question (I did not find it in the forums when searching yet)…
Are there any plans to support USB 3.0 as a networking interface?
I'm building a pfSense box from an mITX board that has 2 x USB 3.0 ports on it and I thought it would be really cool to use the USB 3.0 ports as a backbone to route traffic between pfSense boxes (I'm planning on playing with 3 pfSense boxes, one as a FW the others as Routers in my lab).
It has a lot of bandwidth... I was considering trying to use USB 3.0 for my SAN network as well and it would be awesome to use a pfSense box to route between the VLANs.
Thank you.
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Generally what hardware is supported by the underlying version of FreeBSD is also supported in pfSense. I don't have a link handy for those lists, but you shouldn't have to much trouble finding one in the forum or on the web.
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Generally what hardware is supported by the underlying version of FreeBSD is also supported in pfSense. I don't have a link handy for those lists, but you shouldn't have to much trouble finding one in the forum or on the web.
Thanks for the reply.
I'll start looking harder :-P -
It's not hard to find. Visit the pfSense home page, drop down the Hardware menu and select the Compatibility List.
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@Cry:
It's not hard to find. Visit the pfSense home page, drop down the Hardware menu and select the Compatibility List.
I found the HCL pretty easily… but there is not any mention of USB 3.0 controllers on there.
If the USB 3.0 Controllers use EHCI, then it may just work... but if they don't I think I will have to wait for a new release.I'm guessing that I will need some sort of way to have pfSense use the USB port as a network interface. I don't have the ability to make that, so it's probably a lot further off than I would like it to be... unless I can set it up as a 3.2Gbps High Speed Serial Connection and IP the nodes.
I understand what would need to happen to get it to work... but I'm unsure if pfSense can do it out of box. I may have to try to drum up some money for a bounty :-)
Thanks again for the replies, I'll keep looking around to see what I can come up with.
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FreeBSD 7 pre-dates USB 3.0 by quite a while, you shouldn't be surprised at the lack of documented support.
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Support for 3.0 USB is just now being added to FreeBSD-CURRENT so I doubt we will see that until 9.0 RELEASE which is off in the future. So at the earliest pfSense 2.1 which is mid-late next year.
