New PPPoE Driver in 25.07
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According to Netgate on the 25.07 update: " A new PPPoE backend (if_pppoe)... enables a large performance increase over the traditional MPD-based implementation. In addition to the performance increases, users should see a dramatic decrease in CPU usage."
Question: I have 1GB fiber to my house. Is there any advantage to enabling if_pppoe in 25.07, or does the higher performance only come with multigig internet (which I do NOT have)?
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@FrankZappa
1GB? Enable it, but be careful you must reboot after enable, don't do it remotely because the PPPoE connection stop immediately. -
There is an advantage to enabling it even if your current hardware is capable of passing it already because it will reduce CPU usage. That applies at any speed. A lot of systems hit a limit lower than 1Gbps for PPPoE currently though because it can only use one CPU core in the old driver.
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Thanks for the replies. I enabled it and rebooted my rig. However, I don't notice much difference. CPU "might" be running lower, but not dramatically. It bounces between 2%-9%, at idle, but I think it always did. I haven't tested it with large downloads. I suppose 2% is pretty low for CPU usage at idle (can't get much lower). I need to check it under load. Also, my 1GB fiber speed is pretty much the same. I was getting about 943 down and up, and since I switched if_pppoe on, it's getting about the same speeds. The good news is, nothing appears to be negatively affected by switching on if_pppoe. I'll give it some time and see if it's as good as they say it is. For now, it's fine and everything works great. Thanks, All.
Update: When I perform a speed test using the speedtest widget, my CPU usage increases to approximately 40% during the test and then returns to around 4%. I don't know what the CPU did before if_pppoe was turned on, as I never bothered to look.
My pfSense rig is on an old Dell Latitude laptop running a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2620M CPU. It's been a solid pfSense box that is trouble-free (knock on wood).
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Yeah it will only show reduced usage when the pppoe link is loaded. On CPU that has good single thread performance it will be less apparent. The single threaded mpd5/netgraph driver is restricted by that.
It's still worth using though.
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@stephenw10 is this new if_pppoe also beneficial for the sg3100? And should I remove the tunables I added to incease the pppoe perfromance? Like:
net.isr.dispatch deferred
net.isr.maxthreads -1
net.isr.bindthreads 1 -
It might. If depends if that's the limit it's hitting. The mvneta NICs on the 3100 are single queue anyway so it's always limited to a single CPU core there which may limit more than the PPPoE driver.
But try it and see. The netgraph driver is pretty inefficient in other ways so you should see some change even if it's reduced CPU usage.
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@Cornel said in New PPPoE Driver in 25.07:
And should I remove the tunables I added to incease the pppoe perfromance?
The pfSense documentation on this says if_pppoe "may eliminate the need for additional tuning".
I've removed net.isr.dispatch=deferred from my loader.conf.local file but can't say I've noticed any difference.
