> My firewall at home is an old 486 running NetBSD-1.5.
...
> So, what to do best?

In this situation, probably going to -current and using the in-kernel
stuff there is a good idea. It will give you a *very noticeable* performance
boost!

My max. download rate jumped from 20-25kByte/s using rp-pppoe to ~90kByte/s
using the in-kernel stuff, using a 486/50MHz router. On faster machines the
userland solution will perform better, somewhere at PII/400MHz you won't
see a difference in transfer rate any more (but probably still in latency).

On the other hand, I had absolutely no problems (re: stability) when running
rp-pppoe. (Besides performance, of course)


Martin