I am building a new computer soon and would like to also mess around with pfsense.
My preference would be to have a separate router appliance like the items listed at netgate equipment. But it also seems wasteful in space and cost to have a stand alone unit when I will already have a case, ps, fans etc on a box that will be running 24/7.
Is there something like BliKVM PCIe that is a router?
Just to be clear, not something vituralized like this. I don’t plan on using a hypervisor.
Only supports Linux, works nicely in my experience:
It is not virtualized, it is RouterOS running on the chip on that card 
What are you trying to solve?
I had watched the video on that page and I guess I misunderstood. So does this use the pcie lane just to pass the data through in the same manner as if you had another network card (or integrated networking on the mb) and had connected it via an ethernet cable?
Default, it is just a network card.
What you can do is create a virtual interface that gets an IP and everything as normal, while the card is doing routing-things, including handling traffic the host system will not get to see.
Why not just use your old pc as your new pfsense box?
Be simpler and less problematic.
Yea this sounds like it fits the bill nicely. Less that $200 on Amazon and 2 25G jacks. The only thing it is missing is the pfSense. How do you like the RouterOS?
I am completely fine with RouterOS.
Some people say their command structure is weird, which is fair.
Their GUI is no Ubiquiti, easy enough to figure out where to find things (just think OS while searching for things).
Mikrotik SwitchOS on the other hand, is limited.
…or just get a support consumer router using Mediatek Filogic which works just as good as long as you can live with Linux instead of BSD (network performance and behaviour is a bit different)? The latter is also true with Mikrotik hardware.
My immediate thought is a 3D printer, a 10 GbE small home router, and create something like this (not endorsing that particular product, just saying you could do something similar to this RPi PCIe backplate holder):
That would be neat. I am kinda surprised that nothing like this exists to hold the hardware that is inside one of those cheaper routers on Amazon.
Put it this way. And this is what I tell people in general when it comes to “forbidden router” builds. If your main PC / hypervisor is down for maintenance, your router goes down with it, killing access to the internet or other VLANs in your network for other devices.
Same would apply to anything that you’d build as an attachment to an already powered-on system, like a Raspberry Pi powered by your system’s USB port or power supply. If you don’t want to invest in something like an odroid h3 with a m.2 4x gigabit NIC and a Type-6 case (and even that is a bit overkill, given the box has 2x 2.5gbps NICs already that can work well with a 2.5gbps vlan-aware switch), then just get an old router that has support for OpenWRT and run that instead.
The router should be an appliance that has to be rebooted or maintained less time than a hypervisor or a PC. And if you really want to mess with pfSense, I suggest trying it in a virtualized environment first, even in virtualbox with 1 or 2 other VMs bridged to it (so you emulate a network). Of course, it’s not as good of a learning experience as running it on a live environment (like when you block everything going to the internet and then nothing works and then you make a rule to only allow port 53, 80 and 443 out).
But the same thing can also be done on openwrt.
Buy a small x86 PC that will fit in the box with the rest of your guts. It doesn’t make much sense, but if you want a small parasite in a large PC, then… 
If this is actually for PF, forget about anything other than x86.
Well I specifically said I don’t want to do this via a hypervisor. And I was thinking of something connected directly to the ps so even if the encasing machine was off the router would still have juice. But since there is no existing solution for this that I have seen, I will probably just stuff the router next to the switch in a closet.
Ha yea parasite nails it.
I understood you didn’t want a hypervisor. But what I said was that the same drawbacks as a forbidden router applies to a “parasitic” router (well said Tim). Look at the part when I mention a Pi powered by the PC’s USB or PSU.
Besides not buying an additional PSU, there is no reason I can think of why you’d want a parasitic router.
There aren’t any solutions for a reason, although you could use a RPi 5 or RockPro64 with a PCI-E flexible expander, a 3d-printed bracket and a 2 or 4 port NIC and slap them inside the case in 2 of the case’s PCI-E slots (and power it by the PC’s PSU). Still, I would highly advise against.
For posterity -
