Using ipfire for pppoe decoding

Getting Started with IPFire
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Hi everyone, i would like to know if ipfire is suitable for the setup i have in mind:

My ISP uses PPPoE and my current router can only decode this signal at a rate of 1.2gbps, while i pay for a plan that’s 4gbps. I don’t want to use the router my ISP provided and double NAT my setup. I would like to use ipfire on a powerful computer that can decode that PPPoE signal very fast, and have it operate in layer 2 mode, so my current router still receives the correct WAN ipv4.

I don’t know if “layer 2 mode” is the correct term here, but my old ISP that offers slower speeds, gave me a router that could operate in “bridge mode” so that my own router would get the correct WAN ipv4, my new ISP doesn’t offer this same “bridge mode”.

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Hello,

what you are planning is not possible. The reason is that PPP is not a layer 2 encapsulation protocol that can be bridged onto an Ethernet network. It just encapsulates IP packets.

So I would recommend to install IPFire on some powerful hardware and use that instead of your ISP router.

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@ms thank you for your reply! do you know if there is a way for me to benchmark PPPoE performance? Maybe a linux tool?

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What would you like to benchmark about it? I would just recommend a speedtest. We have an add on for that.

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@ms i meant benchmark on a computer that doesn’t have ipfire installed yet, i want to know which one of my cpu’s can decode 4gbps before i make a whole ipfire setup out of it.

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PPPoE does not have a lot of overhead. The Linux kernel is very efficient with it.

You probably want some beefy hardware though to make it up to the 4 Gbit/s. Make sure you have good NICs.

This is probably what I would recommend:

IPFire Enterprise Appliance (EU) - Firewall Appliances - Lightning Wire Labs Store

It might be slightly oversized, but the next one down might not be powerful enough if you want to send all this data through the IPS as well.

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@ms The link you sent has a cpu with 8 cores that run at 2.1ghz, hard to believe that’s all it takes… Or does it use an advanced instruction set extension to achieve that throughput, like avx512?

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You will need high bus speeds and probably large CPU caches. Special instructions don’t play any role because there is nothing complicated to be done, just memory operations.

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@ms Thank you for your helpful replies! I’ll mark your most recent reply as the solution.

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@ipfirepppoe
[bookmarked] :bangbang: :+1:
please post your results if you get some. :crossed_fingers:
very high speed pppoe experience
has some kind of lack here :hole:

try to search the 'forum' here and
you might get an idea of the pppoe challenge :person_shrugging:

saturate a 4GBiT pppoe connection with 2.1GHz :thinking: