So it turns out that I was overcomplicating bhyve. I apparently read too many sources and ended up confusing myself. There were two things I had messed up in my mind.
- That
vm switchandifconfig bridgeare two paths to get you to the same destination -- to set up the networking in bhyve. - At the same time, I was conflating the bhyve switches with virtual machine interfaces, and that said interfaces can be plugged into the same switch. Since I am trying to convert my configuration in pfSense to OPNsense, I need three interfaces (LAN, WAN, DMZ), but that is defined in the template file, and, it turns out, all should be able to be plugged into the same switch. And if not, I can build a couple of switches as "dummy loads" and plug the switches into them.
I'd like to thank Tom Jones of the BSD Now podcast for getting me back tracking correctly on the networking portion of bhyve. At this point, I got have got bhyve up and running, and I found on the OPNsense forums that you have to use the serial installer image (instead of the vga or dvd) because "bhyve needs the serial image as it doesn't support VGA console"...or at least I haven't figured it out yet. But I was able to get the LAN interface set from the serial image, and since this is a temporary install just to set up the configs, I'll run with what I've got.
So now begins the task of gleaning a good configuration for OPNsense from my existing pfSense box.