[SOLVED] lenovo mini pc M920q with TX550 2 ports LAN RJ45 1.5 - 2.5 - 5 - 10G

[casualrouteruser]

My ISP is KPN ( Dutch phone internet company ) , I have a 4Gb subscription of them; they use PPP0E for establishing internet connection.

And there seems to be the issue, I searched for different solutions in here, like HW offloading, FLOW control disabling, VM and barebone but I do not exceed the estamate 1300 Mbit speed. I do not get my 4Gb download speed ( approxamely ).

What I also found out that the PPPoE method is based on an old way of working... what raises the question: Is OPNsense researching to renew the PPPoE so it is more adequate for today speed standards and future to come?

I even bought and UCG Cloud gateway Fiber to make it work but seems I do not exceed my expected speeds either. But Ubiquity is aware of this and are working on this feature regarding PPPoE.... While my original KPN router box works without issues; this one reaches the expected speeds I can live with. Has any one else a solution how to get this working without any further disassembly or deep re-configuration methods or know that OPNsense team is working for a more elegant solution towards the PPPoE method?

[meyergru]

The M920Q uses a 7 year old processor rated at 2.1 Ghz speed, so its single-thread performance is not really suited to such speeds, even less when PPPoE processing is needed.

You could probably gain some speed with RSS, but I would suggest a much more modern processor. For such kind of speeds, even an N100 or N150 would be at its limits.
 

[casualrouteruser]

Thanks for your reply, I will look into it what I can do about it... I had hoped the new Cloud Gateway Fiber would show me better performance but unfortunately gave the same results....
But while I am eager to find out, it will take some time.

[verfluchten]

The M920Q uses a 7 year old processor rated at 2.1 Ghz speed, so its single-thread performance is not really suited to such speeds

It can do that any time of day like my Core2 Duo could 14 years ago. I am more curious of how X550 is attached to it. Can the OP describe that because I am having hard time picturing being inserted into

[casualrouteruser]

The card is connected by a rizer that is made for this mini pc and is extra supported by an back plane slot.

[verfluchten]

Ah, so DSUB/COM bracket is removable! Gotcha.
If you are getting the same down/up rates from 2x different devices then this is likely not an OS question. I doubt they write drivers. You may have better luck at freebsd.org.
Unify OS is Linux, so if both BSD and Linux deliver the same slow speed, this does not sound like an OS question.
Since the KPN router delivers full 4gbps, there may be different scenarios. One is that it does not use PPPoE. You'd know whether it does or does not if you had to enter credentials. If it came pre-configured, and you did not have to enter any user name or password, then KPN may be using another protocol but offering PPPoE as an alternative to BYOD customers.

[meyergru]

The Unifi machines and FreeBSD have in common that their PPPoE implementations suck. That in combination with either a slow x64 or ARM processor will just limit you in speed, even when those CPUs can route traffic at 10 GBps. It is a question of how much processing power you need. E.g., Ubiquiti also says their Cloud Gateway can only do 5 Gbps with IDS/IPS, which also incurs more effort than just routing.

Those PPPoE implementations suck mainly because in the U.S., PPPoE is rarely used. When done efficiently, you can have it on low-power routers like the KPN one.

As I already said, RSS might help here, because it can distribute the load to multiple cores. A few years ago, the FreeBSD PPPoE implementation was inherently single-threaded. From a while ago, OpnSense has switched to mpd5 as its PPPoE implementation, which can do multithreading, AFAIK - but you will have to enable it via RSS.

You can also see if that is the problem by looking at CPU load during WAN saturation phases - if only one core hits a load or if the total load amounts to one core in total, you know single-threading is the problem.

[casualrouteruser]

Thanks for the suggestions, I will also look into the RSS feature. For the moment I am tinkering with the Ubiquity Cloud Gateway Fiber, after an reset the speedtest gives me around down 3000 Mbs / up 2500 Mbs . This is near the promised 4Gbit speed the ISP provides but I will check OPNSense also just to see that I can make it work with little investment.

I thank you for the advisement :)

[casualrouteruser]

While I tinkered with my OPNsense router with not much success I put my attention more to my new UCG Fiber in combination with NGINX Proxy Manager and have better success, I have the speed and my reverse proxy is working also correct ( even though I like the way how HA Proxy is managed in OPNSense and its certificates ).

I do not see how I can close this question but it can be closed while I do not do any much more investigation in my own OPNSense selfmade router. Thanks for the recommendations where to look, appreciated much.

[meyergru]

You can edit the thread title to mark the topic as [SOLVED].

Just as a side note: pfSense announced a faster if_pppoe implementation.

Looking at their measurements table, you can actually see that enabling RSS speeds up PPPoE even with mpd5:

[Patrick M. Hausen]

mpd5 and netgraph are not that bad ...

Using PPPoE for speeds in the 10G range (and up) is just moronic. ISPs ... 🙄

[meyergru]

Right on point - BTW, I did not want to point out Netscape's "great" new if_pppoe implementation, but just the fact that enabling RSS is quite beneficial on platforms with low frequency and multiple cores. Matter-of-fact, enabling RSS speeds up mpd5 by about as much as the new implementation.

And to reach speeds in the 10G range with PPPoE, even the combination of if_pppoe and RSS is not enough on an Intel C3558 with 2.2 GHz base clock and 4 cores, let alone with mpd5. The latter fact was denied by @Verfluchten, but I guess that those measurements actually proved my point.

[casualrouteruser]

Very usefull information, I will keep this at hand and therefor not destroy my stable VM image of my OPNSense for my M920q. As soon I stumble on the improved methods in future releases I am going to try it out for sure. It is alwasy handy to have a working backup Router at hand if something would go wrong with the existing one. :)

p.s.:
oh and the use of PPPoE my ISP uses comes from legacy use of former services providing like xDSL what they offered before, so probably proved and stable connections. But I guess they forgot if it is also future prove to be used still...