[SunRescue] RE: Why I am *quite* fond of my Linksys router...

[Ken Hansen]

Those little router appliances handle PPPoE easily - I can frequently download 55-63KB/sec (bytes, not bits) over my Linksys router box to my wired and wireless clients in my house (802.11b *is* great!)

Just a data point (if you ever wanted to go above 50 KB/sec)...

Ken

-----Original Message-----
<snip>

In my experience, for home users the problem is not routing per se, but
the PPPoE protocol some of us unfortunate DSL subscribers are stuck
with. The rp-pppoe daemon can easily bring a 486DX or a sun4c SPARC to
its knees. (My IPX with powerup won't do more then 50KB/sec over my
768kbps DSL line.) I don't know how that thing manages to suck up so
much power, but it does; and it's not only user time either -- according
to top, it's about 1/3 user time and 2/3 system time. (The pppoed runs
in user space, but uses bpf.) What's really curious about this is that
switching the normal 40MHz processor with a 80MHz powerup didn't change
anything -- throughput is still stuck at 50KB/s.

But NetBSD is getting in-kernel PPPoE now, so this will probably get
better soon. (You should be able to synchronous PPP with in-kernel PPPoE
too -- with the rp-pppoe package, you can only do asynchronous PPP,
which sucks up even more time.)