WoL support on Broadcom chips

[Frank Leonhardt]

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?

-----

% ifconfig -m bge0
bge0: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP>
metric 0 mtu 1500
options=c019b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,VLAN_HWTSO,LINKSTATE>
capabilities=c019b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,TSO4,VLAN_HWTSO,LINKSTATE>
        ether 3c:4a:92:77:af:4e
        inet 192.168.1.215 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
        inet6 fe80::3e4a:92ff:fe77:af4e%bge0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
        media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
        status: active
        supported media:
                media autoselect mediaopt flowcontrol
                media autoselect
                media 1000baseT mediaopt full-duplex,master
                media 1000baseT mediaopt full-duplex
                media 1000baseT mediaopt master
                media 1000baseT
                media 100baseTX mediaopt full-duplex
                media 100baseTX
                media 10baseT/UTP mediaopt full-duplex
                media 10baseT/UTP
        nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>

-----

% pciconf -lv | grep -A1 -B3 network
bge0@pci0:3:0:0:        class=0x020000 rev=0x10 hdr=0x00 vendor=0x14e4
device=0x165b subvendor=0x103c subdevice=0x705d
    vendor     = 'Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries'
    device     = 'NetXtreme BCM5723 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe'
    class      = network
    subclass   = ethernet

-----

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?

Any ideas?

Thanks, Frank.

[Frank Leonhardt]

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).