[drdaeman]

I'm worried about "without an external pppd daemon" part.

There's no point in PPPoE without PPP. And if they say "without external pppd" this means they're going to ship a full-fledged PPP daemon.

[eggnet]

The linux kernel has had native PPPoE support since 2.4.

https://wiki.debian.org/PPPoE

[drdaeman]

Yes, that's the difference with rp-pppoe.so (using kernel module to handle encapsulation, userspace code only sets up the sockets) and pppd's pty option (got it a bit wrong in my other comment in this thread, believed it's a pipe, thanks for correcting) with separate process to do so. It doesn't really matter.

More than this, Linux kernel has kernel-mode PPP. But still a few parts of PPP, and all accompanying control protocols (especially authentication-related ones like EAP - you don't want that beast in the kernel!) are done in userspace.