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And what? I'm not sure what you're replying to.
I haven't. They didn't offer anything of value for my use cases (home/small business).
I'm not a datacenter guy, but how many systems did you oversee that ran FreeBSD? Chelsio is heavily recommended on FreeBSD based OSes such as pfSense, OPNsense, TrueNAS Core (formerly FreeNAS), etc.... because historically they have had some of the best FreeBSD support. CXGBE for Chelsio NICs was introduced into the FreeBSD kernel around 2012 and since it's inception supported "Jumbo Frames, Transmit/Receive checksum offload, TCP segmentation offload (TSO), Large Receive Offload (LRO), VLAN tag insertion/extraction, VLAN checksum offload, VLAN TSO, and Receive Side Steering (RSS)".
Not a one I believe on BSD professionally. But I've had plenty of Linux systems over the years we always just bought Intels for those. Personally my Pfsense(1gig), TrueNAS(10gig) and Proxmox(10gig) all run Intel NICs. I guess it's a BSD thing.
That's exactly what it was / is. I agree, I've worked in datacenters with thousands of machines. I've never seen one either. That being said when I built the machine five or six years ago people were saying that the BSD drivers for Chelsio were far more compatible than Intel at the time. I think now things may have changed and it does not matter as much anymore.
FreeBSD support for NICs (and hardware in general) has gotten better over the years, but Linux can sometimes be better. For a reference to supported hardware on the current release (at this time it is 13.2) you can refer to the FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE Hardware Notes
The caveat that will matter to most people is the free version limits you to 50 IP addresses total. So I guess if you never intend to have that many IPs active across your networks then give it a shot. You could throw IPFire or OpenWRT into the considerations too.
I didn't know it had this limitation. Is this a DHCP, subnet, or simply routing limit? Ie, can you setup up 100 static IPs and it still route or does it truly limit to 50 IPs?
Sophos UTM Free has a 50 IP limit (not 100% sure how it worked but I assume it just didn't route traffic beyond the first 50 IPs it establishes). I've read using both an IPv4 and IPv6 address on a client will take up two addresses too lol. It looks like they are still offering updated software builds of it but don't as heavily advertise it? Maybe you can't even sign up anymore and you need to already have it established on the free account?
In my line of work it's Solarflare (now owned by AMD) or sometimes Mellanox (now owned by NVidia). They're both high performance NICs. I'm in the financial trading business. Of course we also use the usual Intel & Broadcom stuff in systems that aren't low latency trading systems. We tend to view those as "regular" NICs and not pay too much attention to them. Solarflare has kernel bypass libraries & drivers for Linux, and Mellanox supports RDMA (remote direct memory access -- allows a machine to designate a region of system memory that another machine can read from or write to without intervention from the CPU). For desktop use Mellanox/NVidia is good. RDMA can work with Windows file sharing (SMB Direct), and they have official support for client Windows. Solarflare is a PITA in Windows. No official support unless it's Windows server, and you have to jump through hoops in PowerShell to install the drivers and get one working. Both are fine in Linux, though you'll likely need a "corporate" distribution if you want all the features. RedHat for sure, Ubuntu LTS is usually ok.
The ram and core limit ones was the sophos I was thinking of. And yeah that Arista one seems pretty neat too. Any of these are far better than any consumer router, that's for sure.