Hello dear PCENGINES team.
Just wanted to highlight, that your APU2 board cannot handle full 1 Gigabit WAN traffic inbound (from Internet), if the ISP provides the WAN connection through PPPoE protocol.
Regardless of APU2C0,APU2C2, or APU2C4 (the issue present in all models)
PPPoE connection type cannot use Receive Side Scaling loadbalancing, and the Intel i210 / 211 NIC multi-queue feature cannot be used (the NIC will use only queue 0, and not the others), because all the WAN traffic will be encapsulated
into 1 stream, and by definition that cannot be load-balanced into multiple receive queues.Same issue affects any non-IP traffic, like VPN tunneling so all of the IPSEC, PPTP. L2TP, GRE protocols.
So only 1 CPU core will receive the full PPPoE network traffic, regardless of how many different flows are inside the encapsulated stream. Because a single core running @1Ghz is insufficient to process the full Gigabit network traffic, you will never be able to reach 1 Gbit routing traffic using an APU2 board (1 CPU core is 100% utilised, while the other 3 CPU core is IDLE 90+%). If you add firewall / IDS rules, performance will be even more lower. So APU2 is NOT RECOMMENDED for Gigabit over PPPoE firewall purpose.
Unless the RSS standard is updated by MSFT or Intel improves the i210/211 NIC firmware to properly load-balance even PPPoE frames (totally unlikely as I see this issue).
I would like to ask you to put this info clear warning on the datasheet of the APU2, not to mislead your future customers, who will buy your product believing that multi-queue NIC and quad-core CPU can easily handle
Gigabit traffic, when their ISP provider is using PPPoE protocol instead of simple IP connection.
Proof from FreeBSD kernel mail list:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203856