Does it show up as an interface in ip a? If it doesn’t it usually means, that you don’t have drivers for it / the drivers aren’t in mainline, but sometimes it’s the usb role switching of the phone being stuck in peripheral mode (a reboot with the adapter plugged in usually fixes it).

Depending on what you want to do with the phone and how permanent the connection is, an alternative method would be to connect it to the router with a usb cable. Enable the usb debug connection on in pmbootstrap when building the image (it might be possible to do this on the phone too) and set up routing on the router and add an ip address and a default route to the debug interface on the phone, it should behave as if it were a normal network card (but with a dhcp server running on it).

I’m sorry I didn’t read that you posted on this before before finishing this, I’m way too tired qwq

These prices are terrible, even for Europe.

Zebra works with cups, the ppd files are included with cups

The performance drop from virtualizing nics shouldn’t be nearly as big. How are you passing the vlans to the VM? are you passing all over one virtio nic or one virtio nic for each.

The setup I ran for multiple years was basicly a bridge interface on the host for each vlan and a seperate virtio nic to the opnsense VM for each, I got almost 10 gbit/s like that with 8gigs of ram for opnsense and 4 or 8 cores (I cant remember) with hyperthreading of a 2nd gen epyc. I didn’t do any optimisations for virtio.