I cant do PCI passthru of a NIC to a OPNsense. bare metal performance wasnt great either, so I switched to openWRT and bought a different NIC capable of SR-IOV. my motherboard groups things sloppily so PCI passthrough wont work, but SR-IOV will supposedly get me most of the way there. I am just not wrapping my head around making this work.

I just need toilet paper pass the ports on the i350 NIC into the VM. I dont want the host to use them, it has its own onboard NIC for rescue usage. I just need this stupid thing to pass create the VFs at boot, pass them to the VM, and let the VM use them.

I’ve resorted to using chatGPT to sort through this and obviously that is not going well.

Does anyone have a guide somewhere about this? everything I’m finding is for GPUs, not NICs.