pfSense 2.2 Brings AES-GCM With AES-NI Acceleration

Chris Buechler has released version 2.2 of the pfSense FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.

Friday's pfSense 2.2 release re-bases against FreeBSD 10.1 to offer new hardware support and performance improvements. The pfSense developers also brought new functionality like AES-GCM with AES-NI acceleration on supported harware via an updated IPsec stack, an updated PHP 5.5 implementation, and many bug-fixes. The pfSense 2.2 release closes out 392 tickets of which there's at least 135 bugs addressed and 55 features/tasks that were crossed out. Pfsense 2.2 is a huge leap forward given that it was previously based on FreeBSD 8.3 before jumping straight ahead to the current 10.1 stable series. The pfSense 2.2 release also has some security fixes, default configuration improvements, firewall rule updates, and a lot of other work.

The pfSense 2.2 release announcement can be read via the pfSense blog while over here is the exhaustive list of v2.2 changes and new features.