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    Can QuickAssist be virtualized on Rangeley (C2758) ?

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    • R
      rudyrednose last edited by

      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!

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      • ?
        Guest last edited by

        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.

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        • M
          messerchmidt last edited by

          QA will hopefully be supported in a future release

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

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          • R
            rudyrednose last edited by

            @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

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            • ?
              Guest last edited by

              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.

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