Re: WoL support on Broadcom chips

On 18/02/2025 12:12 am, Frank Leonhardt wrote:
> I'm afraid this is a repeat question - I asked it in 2012 but it's 
> been a long time and I'd have hoped it had been fixed by now.
>
> What's with the WoL support on Broadcom chips?
> Basically they don't support WoL, even if enabled in the firmware. 
> When the driver shuts down it it trashes the appropriate register. Why 
> has no one fixed this in the driver, ever?
>
I've done a few more experiements and this problem doesn't affect newer 
Broadcom chips. Having hacked the driver to make it work with the older 
ones in the past, I'm now mystified as to how the same driver - same 
code path - works on new ones unaltered.

Specifically, although I don't have anything like a comphehensive list, 
the chip used in HP G7 and earlier doesn't work, but in HP G8+ it does 
(until they switched to Intel, of course).

Ah - it's a bug in the BIOS, you think. Possibly, but I did fix the 
driver so it worked in spite of it whatever the BIOS was doing. But I 
can believe the BIOS was setting the chip up correctly on shutdown 
according to its settings, overriding what the FreeBSD driver was 
failing to do (i.e. setting the flags in the control register correctly).