General Questions

Hey there,

  I've used m0n0wall for a long time, and was kinda forced to switch to pfSense because m0n0wall didn't support Atheros or wireless-G.  And getting new wireless cards isn't exactly an option for me at this point, nor do I want to go for slow B speeds :|
  Just out of curiosity I checked the CVS repository, and noticed a freeBSD6 folder in there.  So, my question is:  is that build stable?  If so, I'd love to know how to install it.  pfSense seems like a really nice project, but I've noticed a few things I really haven't liked much with it; it takes a while to go from cold boot to operational state, the GUI is sluggish and seems to want to rebuild the queues every time I make changes that I wouldn't think would affect them (but I'm not an expert here), the shaping doesn't seem to be as good as good ol' m0n0wall, and m0n0wall had a much higher throughput (esp with p2p going a lot).  Another thing I noticed is that pfSense seems to end up corrupted very easily when the power drops -- m0n0wall never had this problem.
  I'd love to switch back to m0n0wall!  If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, I'm open for 'em!

Router box:
Intel 810 chipset board
Intel 500Mhz Celeron
512MB SDRAM
4GB HD
Network drivers:  rl, sis, dc, ath (wan, lan, dmz, wifi)

download is available as img form on the main m0n0wall site as 1.3b but they are beta versions

Before I go installing a beta, is it relatively stable, and is the performance close to, if not better than the stable release versions? 
I'm hosting the wireless mainly for my roommate and neighbor, and they do contribute to the bill.  If the layout of the apt allowed for a nice fast cable, I'd go all wired and just use stable, but alas... no such luck.

i dont know specific as i have not tested but i have read that some have said it was stable and others not.

It'll be the same speed as pfsense, and substantially slower than m0n0wall 1.2x. The wireless functionality isn't as comprehensive as pfsense's at this point, but what is available should be stable.

Just out of curiosity, why would it be slower than the old monowall?  is the new kernel or other stuff bloated in comparison?  could it be recompiled to eliminate any 'bloat' if so?

kinda thought that since *nix OS's were open source, they'd offer more functionality, but without sacrificing in the way of speed. 
 

OS development is a hell of a lot more complex than, to paraphrase you, "it's open source, so it must offer more functionality without sacrificing speed".

This has been explained numerous times in the mailing list archives if you want to go look. The short of it is FreeBSD 6.x is slower for network throughput than 4.x on single processor hardware, just like Linux 2.6 is slower than 2.4 for the same. The focus of FreeBSD 5.x and 6.x was better scalability on SMP systems, and one of the consequences of that was slowing down uniprocessor systems for certain things like network throughput. It's getting better, but may never get back to the point of FreeBSD 4.x.

FreeBSD 4.x has likely the fastest networking of any general purpose OS ever written, on uniprocessor systems, so it's a tough act to follow. It blows away any Linux version. Comparing newer releases, FreeBSD 6.x and Linux 2.6 are roughly equal, the last numbers I saw.

SMP is the focus of development because going forward most systems will be SMP, and every new PC sold today is SMP (aside from most specialized embedded hardware). FreeBSD 6.2 is faster on SMP systems than 4.11 is. Doesn't help us with most firewalls, though it's clearly the appropriate focus for the future.

Also if you replace your hodgepodge of mostly cheap cruddy NIC's with some good ones like Intel Pro/100 or Pro/1000, you'll see your performance increase quite a bit.