[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#501351: Bug#501351: sysvinit: halt breaks wake on lan / WOL under NFS root /diskless lenny

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Harry Coin]
> Upgrading to lenny from etch has broken wake on lan after 'poweroff'
> on our many Dell Optiplex headless /diskless systems.  All packages
> are latest lenny/testing as of 6 October 2008.

This is sad.

> Looking at the code I see that the latest network drivers always
> disable WOL after ifup and before ifdown. Then, either at driver
> unload time or ifdown time they set the WOL bit in hardware
> according to option.

It the kernel drivers behavior with respect to wake-on-lan defined
somewhere?  As I see this, the kernel drivers have no consistent
interface to userspace, and thus make it impossible to solve this in a
reliably way in userspace.  This make it the responsibility of the
kernel drivers and the kernel space to come up with a solution.  If
there is a definition on how the kernel drivers should behave, and
user space applications can depend on this definition during shutdown,
we can discuss how to solve this in sysvinit.  Until such definition
show up, I have no idea how to solve this issue reliably.

Please let us know how the kernel decided to handle wake-on-lan in
network drivers, if such decision exist.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen