Adam Van Ornum wrote:
I've been looking into a Via C7 based system to run pfSense on and so far all of the systems seem to have either Realtek or Via based LAN chipsets. Several people have mentioned before that the Realtek chipsets are not very well supported at this time and I'm wondering how well the Via chipsets are supported.
They're supported fine, the problem is there are bunches of no name manufacturers putting out junk cards based on the Realtek chipset because it's cheap. Many of them make flaky hardware, hence it's gotten a bad name. People tend to pull stuff out of their junk hardware pile and throw it together to make a firewall, or buying whatever is cheapest on ebay, and hence end up using this flaky hardware.
I have several embedded devices with Realtek NIC's and they're perfectly reliable (see our recommended vendors page on the website, they're from companies listed there). They aren't as fast as Intel cards, mostly noticeable only on the gigabit cards or very slow CPU's (1 GHz VIA with Realtek 10/100 cards will do 100 Mb wire speed no problem), but they work fine.
Specifically, are VLANs supported on the Via chipsets?
Check the man page for the driver used by the specific chipset you're talking about.
