It depends on what you want to do and what kind of hardware acceleration your home router offers. Using NAT acceleration (a common feature on many Asus and other home routers) and want to inspect every incoming packet? If so, your hardware accelerated NAT or cut through forwarding is not going to allow that, QoS is also incompatible with such hardware acceleration as is PAT.
You also should consider that BSD uses PF (packet filter) and not netfilter (iptables), ipfw or ipfilter like you’ll see on most home routers. PF is faster and more stable than most other offerings and most of your retired boxes these days are dual core with more RAM than a router will need so slowdowns should not be an issue.
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