Tag Archives: motherboard

Bad BIOS!

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In my quest to get my motherboard (Gigabyte S-series GA-MA790FX-DS5) to wake-on-LAN, I tried upgrading the BIOS from Gigabyte’s download site from version F6 to version F8F. Bad idea! After the upgrade, the system would sometimes reboot spontaneously. This seemed to happen with more resource-intensive processes. The Gigabyte support folks were not really helpful (they just told me to check the cables), and, indeed, I am still working with them to fully enable the wake-on-LAN feature, which they claim is fully tested.

Since reverting the BIOS back to F6, the spontaneous reboot problems seem to have gone away.

Stir-on-LAN

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I got Wake-on-LAN almost working on my desktop computer. It took some trial and error, but here are the essential steps:

  • I configured my Gigabyte S-series GA-MA790FX-DS5 motherboard BIOS to have PME Event set to enabled; this enables wake-on-LAN which means, apparently, that the NIC still receives a little bit of power in order to check for the Magic Packet. I also tweaked the ACPI configuration by setting the ACPI Suspend Type to be S3(STR), so that when I do a suspend (rather than hibernate or power-off), only RAM gets power and not the CPU.

  • I changed /etc/rc./init.d/halt so that it ends with:

    # Wakeup-on-LAN

/usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g
sleep 5 # one source claims this matters

exec $command $HALTARGS

  • I created /etc/pm/sleep.d/99network:

    # Restart the network interfaces after suspending
# Author: Victor Chudnovsky (victor dot chudnovsky at g m a i l  dot c o m)

case "$1" in
    thaw|resume)
        service network restart
        ;;
    suspend|hibernate)
        /usr/sbin/ethtool -s eth0 wol g
    sleep 5 # one source claims this matters
        ;;
    *)
        ;;
esac

exit $?

  • To allow waking up my desktop from the outside, I made sure my router allows WOL packets to reach the machine. One can do this either by setting the machine to be the DMZ server or by explictly configuring these packets to be routed through (typically on port 9)

  • Possibly unnecessary but it can’t hurt: Disabled the standard r8169 driver and instead installed the official r8168 RealTek driver for my onboard Realtek 8111B ethernet chip. I followed the directionsin the README, which essentially amount to the steps here.

  • Possibly unnecessary: I created /etc/pm/config.d/config with contents:

    SUSPEND_MODULES="r8168"

That was enough to enable suspend-to-LAN. To actually wake the computer, one needs a client that can send the Magic Packet to the wakeable machine. These clients thus need the IP address of the machine (or a broadcast address) and the MAC address of the NIC that is a wol-able.

  • I got an Android app for my phone, aWOL that allows multiple profies for various machines that can be woken up remotely.

  • I installed ether-wake and wol clients on various computers from which I want to wake up my desktop.

This set-up seems to work pretty well. There are some occasional issues I’m encountering that I’m still trying to debug:

  • Rarely, I’ve noticed that if I suspend or hibernate and resume too many times too quickly, these operations start failing with a Device or resource busy message in /var/log/pm-suspend/log, but if I wait for a while and try again, it starts working.

  • The remaining problem is this: if I’m powered off for too long, the card does not respond to the Magic Packet. This defeats the whole purpose of this feature, obviously, so I’m trying to figure out under what conditions this happens. I found this problem mentioned elsewhere, but no solution as of yet. I asked Gigabyte customer support, but have not heard back from them yet.

For more information, refer to the Xlife wol guide or the Wake-on-LAN mini-HOWTO .