Getting gigabit on a PCEngines apu4d4 and PPPoE

Network>Interfaces>Global Network Options

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I have already updated my firmware to the latest (4.16.0.4). Is there something I have to do in order to enable turbo mode after that? /proc/cpuinfo says my cores are only running at ~650MHz normally and ~950MHz under load.

And yeah I wish CenturyLink used DHCP instead of PPPoE, but they're stuck in the past; most of their Internet offerings are DSL and I assume that this makes their provisioning easier.

I had an apu1d2 for a while, it was able to route 900mbit or so, in a lab, never used it live, with my ISP.

Yours has better NICs.
Same scenario as @shdf though, no PPPoE.

Thanks. That doesn't seem to have changed anything, unfortunately.

no, it's all managed by the cpu. you don't even see it at 1.2ghz because it's not reported to the OS. only benchmarks showed that the turbo was working.

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Force performance governor instead of ondemand for both cpu's 0/1?

PPPoE is a quite significant additional load on the CPU, which is already marginal for plain routing at 1 GBit/s (as you noticed, linux can achieve that, the xBSD drivers can't).

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Just tried that (on all four cores, not just policy0), no change.

That's what I was afraid of. Maybe I could do something funky with the ISP-provided router and have it handle the PPPoE and then I just use the apu4d4 for the routing/DHCP/etc.

Please read this thread, at least this comment :

  • PPPoE: if your internet provider is using PPPoE protocol, and you have purchased a Fiber WAN over Gigabit, the APU2 cannot reach that 1 Gigabit in real life. More realistic is somewhere between 200 and 650 Mbit (the latter is the absolute maximum under real life condtiona). Reason: the PPPoE is single-threaded under *BSD, and the 1 Ghz cores in this SoC cannot handle that amount of traffic. PF and NAT can (and fornsure will!) decrease this value even further. There are no surprises, clock speed wins over core count in single threaded code. So this should set your expectations when your ISP is using PPPoE over that gigabit fiber connection!
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You really want to terminate the PPPoE Session on your OpenWrt router, mostly for these reasons:

  • having the WAN IP and the NAT on your OpenWrt router, avoiding double NAT
  • ease of use (not having to configure port-forwardings etc. twice)
  • security

I was thinking that maybe the ISP router would have a bridging mode I can put it into. I've had DSL ISPs in the past which provide that option, and that avoids the double-NAT/double-forwarding issue.

... and you can get a used, gigabit capable device, on ebay for $50-100, if you're willing to spend the time and $.

Read the thread I posted earlier.

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Already tried 22.03rc3 or even 19.07.x just for the quick speed test different linux version can have huge impact on performance?

I guess you are running x86 64bit, may even try 32bit?

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I'd seen a few threads like that (although not that specific one), which is what led me to try OpenWRT instead of pfSense. OpenWRT is absolutely performing better than pfSense (about 3x as fast) but obviously it can only do so much.

I think I'm okay with this situation for now, and in the future I'll just look into a faster device to upgrade to (or maybe CenturyLink will wise up and switch to DHCP).

Those all sound like good things to try, I'll experiment with that later. Thanks!

Put a managed switch between the isp router and the apu for vlan tagging, disable other ethX interfaces except WAN & LAN?

keep an eye on this topic, this device for the price has some very interesting features... the SOC is a quad core ARM at 2.2Ghz :star_struck:

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It looks like I can set the ISP router to become a transparent bridge (according to this Reddit thread). That's probably what I'll mess with next. But in the meantime I need to get back to work. :slight_smile:

Okay, this is interesting... after all of the fiddling in this thread I ended up rebooting my router again and suddenly I'm getting a full gigabit down! Still only 650-700 up (which is where I really want to get gigabit speeds), but dang.

Now if only I knew which specific thing I did changed it.

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