[bjw4]

Maybe we’ll see decent PPPoE performance from PFSense in the future then - had to move to OpenWrt as PFSense has a single threaded implementation

[ActionHank]

I actually ended up moving away from pf\OpnSense because of this.

No matter what switches I toggled or incantations I recited I would not get full line speed.

[woleium]

this may be related to the performance of the intel nic driver for bsd.

[topspin]

I associate PPPoE with dial up modems. What is the use case of this today? Also, PPPoE has been around for a quarter century: why hasn't FreeBSD delivered on it? And how is a single thread not enough to fill a broadband pipe?

So many questions.

So DSL and maybe Fiber services. Ok, but ISPs provide or endorse some device to deal with the wire. At that point you're free to firewall your ordinary ethernet traffic with whatever you wish, no PPPoE involved, no?

[bjw4]

PPPoE is still very common in the UK, even over fibre. I think it’s something to do with allowing multiple providers on the same infra.

The encapsulation requires a lot of CPU power, and on non specialised x86 hardware you end up needing a highly clocked CPU to get gigabit speeds.

OpenWRT is Linux based so has a multithreaded implementation.

My Flint 2 router has some sort of hardware acceleration so hammering a gigabit line shows <1% CPU, leaving lots of overhead for things like Docker.

[topspin]

Thanks for the useful explanation.

Despite another comment claiming this was "common" in the US, I've been on a number of ISPs in the US and never seen PPPoE used at all. Had no idea this was still going on. On fiber even!

Seems like I'd get some kind of efficient PPPoE box and put that between the ISP and whatever software router/firewall (PfSense, et al.) or "non specialized" hardware router. I suppose fragmentation could be avoided by limiting packet size a little to make room for the 8 byte PPPoE bits.

[ActionHank]

Many DSL installations use PPPoe, additionally some Fibre installs too.

[ihattendorf]

It's very common in the US for DSL and also some fiber providers.

[denimnerd42]

DSL