IPoE/DHCP from IDNet?

Could IDNet offer IP over Ethernet/DHCP instead of PPPoE to access their services over CityFibre? Given that they work with several different network providers, I guess PPPoE is easier because it is most likely common to all of them. But there are some ISPs that use IPoE instead of PPPoE...

My reason for asking is that I am using x86 hardware for my router (running VyOS) and PPPoE decoding is the performance bottleneck- because it has to be processed by the CPU - there is no hardware acceleration for PPPoE on my network interfaces. I get ~900 Mbps going from one VLAN to another on my network but much less than that to/from the internet over PPPoE.

Upgrading my hardware would solve this but there much be a lot of energy wasted in the world by PPPoE... has anyone else experienced this?

I can't answer your question but I'm surprised that Vyos PPPoE performance is poor - AFAIK the Linux kernel PPPoE implementation is not single threaded (unlike *BSD) so you should be able reach ~900Mbps. What kind of speeds are you seeing?

Edited by mjhturner (Mon 16-Mar-26 10:53:13)

As per the previous post, an x86 router should have no issues with PPPoE. What's the CPU usage you're seeing when putting stuff through it?

It is pretty old now: PC Engines APU2 C4

CPU: AMD GX-412TC @ 1 GHz
RAM: 4 GB DDR3-1333
Ethernet: 3x Intel i210AT

When running `iperf3 -R -c speedtest.idnet.net` on another machine, I can see the `ksoftirqd/1` reaching 100% on VyOS. The maximum transfer rate for iperf3 is 410 Mbps. fast.com does nearly 600 Mbps.

I should probably just replace it with an Intel N150 based machine - but it is frustrating that it performs perfectly well when just routing IP.