Can QuickAssist be virtualized on Rangeley (C2758) ?

rudyrednose

Greetings,

For an upcoming home server, I want to use pfsense 2.2.
As my bandwith needs are moderate, I thought about using pfsense in a VM. The box would also do NAS duties and maybe low volume web server through other VMs.

The hardware I got is a SuperMicro A1SRi-2758F, going into a big case. As the Rangeley C2758 processor has QuickAssist, I wondered if there was any way QA can run on a VM or it needs absolutely to run on the bare metal.

Hypervisor would probably be ESXi, which I am not familiar with. So far I have only played with Hyper-V, but I do not want to have to reboot the whole machine for an OS patch …
Is there another OS agnostic hypervisor that would be more appropriate ?

Thank you!

Hello,

As the Rangeley C2758 processor has QuickAssist, I wondered

I would be looking further to AES-NI inside of the C2758, because Intel QA is not supported under
FreeBSD and then also not in pfSense too. So the AES-NI function will be more interesting for
pfSense users as I see it right now.

messerchmidt

QA will hopefully be supported in a future release

and yes, a VM should be able to access same.

rudyrednose

@messerchmidt:

a VM should be able to access same.

This is not so obvious for two reasons:

Rangeley does NOT support Vt-d based peripheral virtualization.
The underlying co-processing HW may have very deep buffers. I was not able to find a good description of Rangeley's QA HW architecture.

If a VM can access the QA hardware, it may end up that QA would be dedicated to that one and only one VM… I don't know, I am a newbie to both pfsense and ESXi :P

Intel QA is not supported under FreeBSD and then also not in pfSense too.

From previous posts by gonzopancho, I suspect prototypes of pfsense may already run QA on the bare metal of https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/pfsense-store.html#c2758

From previous posts by gonzopancho, I suspect prototypes of pfsense may already run QA on the bare metal of https://www.pfsense.org/hardware/pfsense-store.html#c2758

It can be but is also only guesswork and nothing anyone can trust really on, so as I see it
like in other posts here in the forum also where explained, better buy a CPU that comes
with AES-NI and if this CPU will also comes with Intel QA, it might be nice to have for
the future usage, but once more again nothing I would count on!

For the ESXi it would at the time the best choice to go with a Intel Xeon E3 or E5
together with ECC RAM, to build a stable box that is also sorted by AES-NI and VD-T
assets.

For sure I personally would really prefer to buy a crypto accelerator card likes the Exar DX-1700
Series and I must not think about all this things.