PfSense and xen PV drivers

[yaxattax]

Hi all,

I've got pfSense running recently as a pure HVM guest in a fedora+xen host. Everything is working as expected, except one thing. I have passed through one of the NICs to the hvm guest so that it runs natively, however due the requiring remote access for the dom0, and requirement to run other domUs, I had to run the second NIC as a shared physical device, which requires the use of qemu-dm. Unfortunately, doing so has performance implications. qemu-dm is using 25-50% CPU time (of a single core) to push around 20-25mbits/s of unencrypted traffic. All LAN traffic comes through this interface and I am reasonably sure it is adding a few ms to pings. I wanted to know if anybody has got pfSense running as a PV guest, or PVHVM guest, and if so, is there any advice they could offer?

Kind regards,

Yax

[yaxattax]

I found something that shows some promise for getting this out of the box

http://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD10

But that probably wouldn't materialise and trickle into pfSense 'til 2013, maybe 2014 ..