OpenWrt is commonly used to breathe new (or better) life into consumer routers, but you can also run it on any x86 machine. I run it on a small, passively-cooled i5 machine* virtualized in Proxmox alongside Home Assistant. I originally ran OPNSense, then VyOS, but eventually went back to OpenWRT since it does everything I want/need with a simple interface. * https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/hzvfih/new_router…
I've run virtualized network applications before, and have always had trouble with the container mapping addresses into a new private IP subnet. Is this able to be worked around?
Use qemu and bridge networking or pass through a physical network device.