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TL, DR: If you are building a pfSense box with an x86 chip made in the past ~7 years [1], stop reading and carry on.

Those of you on a power budget, and want e.g. VPN support at closer to wire speeds, you're being advised to select a CPU with AES-NI to get hardware crypto offload. It's great we have software crypto in the first place, but under load it's likely to put a cap on your max throughput.

Kudos to pfSense/Netgate announcing this ahead of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set#Supporting...

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AMD has shipped AES-NI in every processor family starting with Bulldozer in 2011.

Intel started in 2010 with Westmere, but kept it out of the lower-end models like Pentium, Celeron, and i3 for several generations. Only since Skylake (2015) is it included in every model produced from a supporting architecture. At least for Intel processors, the generalization above, absent other disclaimers, does not apply.

Actual lookup tables are linked in other posts like this one [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14240007

The immediate predecessor to the Netgate SG-2220 ( I forget the Model, but it was based off of the the PC Engines apu1d [1]) does not support AES-NI. It has the AMD G series T40E, which is based off of the Bobcat architecture [2] [3]). I use pfsense as a home router, and while I am very happy with it, I will be forced to upgrade that hardware, and I do not use any feature sets that require the use of AES-NI.

In addition, the Netgate SG-2220 uses an Atom C2338, which was susceptible to the LPC bus failure [4] [5]. So as of right now, I would also be extremely hesitant to purchase the Netgate SG-2220 without some sort of assurance that the router I got is not affected by it.

[1] https://pcengines.ch/apu1d4.htm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_accelerated_proces...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobcat_(microarchitecture)

[4] https://www.netgate.com/products/sg-2220.html

[5] http://www.anandtech.com/show/11110/semi-critical-intel-atom...

EDIT: Interestingly enough, someone from Netgate said that the PC Engines APU is unaffected: https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/68nd6y/pfsense_25_... EDIT2: Seems they edited that, the APU1d won't be compatible.

Not Bobcat, unfortunately - which is what's in the PC Engines APUv1.

The Celeron J1900 (released 2013) does not support AES-NI. It's popular in low-powered mini PC devices, many of which come preinstalled with pfSense when purchased from Aliexpress.

Ditto for the Celeron 3215U, which is used in some newer devices along the same lines.

Close. Sadly the Celeron I bought that came out in 2011 doesn't support this.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...

Do newer, but still cheap CPU's work with AES-NI?

What is your definition of cheap? Don't rule out ARM based solutions.

Well, to get 2.5 running I am going to have to build another box. I'll need a CPU and motherboard. Possibly RAM. I'd like to find that for under $300. Under $150 would be more ideal.

I'm certainly not ruling anything out. I simply want to be able to get a working PFSense instance up and running.

PCengines APU2 has an AMD CPU with AES-NI, http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2c4.htm

^- While cheap toy SoCs like those found in SBCs do (all?) have NEON, which includes hardware acceleration for SHA1/2 and AES, don't assume good performance. A x86 desktop core is faster in software than those SoCs with hardware.

However, the poor I/O capabilities of most/all toy SoCs rule use as a high-bandwidth router out; you can't do Gigabit routing with just one built-in MAC and the other connected to a USB 2.0 port or somesuch.

The expressobin board has 3 NICs, runs a dual-core Marvell 3700, which is ARMv8, and has a crypto-offload on the SoC.

It sells for $49 on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06Y3V2FBK

AES-GCM runs quite well on ARMv8:

https://www.rsaconference.com/writable/presentations/file_up...

That's an interesting board, but it still only has one Ethernet interface, plus an on-board switch.

It has two, actually. I'm looking at the 3700 and some of the NXP CPUs for a 2018 "microfirewall".

We have a 3 port ARM board (one port has a switch on it) being announced on Thursday.

The device has 3 ethernet interfaces - one directly connected to the SoC, and the other two via an onboard switch.

That's not at all what the board's block diagram [0] depicts, but apparently they don't care to make that accurate. While the photographs do make it clear that there are three Ethernet ports, it's wrong to say that there are three Ethernet interfaces; the SoC only supports two and it's misleading to count the extra switched ports as extra interfaces because they do not even have the theoretical possibility of contributing to better routing capabilities.

[0] http://espressobin.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ESPRESSObi...

It's usually not even worth the cost of electricity to keep running hardware that old. Upgrading to modern power efficient hardware pays for itself pretty quickly with lower electrical bills.

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