New PPPoE Driver in 25.07
-
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)?
-
@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.
-
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).
-
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.
