HP Pavilion 500-149 - MSI MS-7778 (JasmineR) - WOL

Hi,

I'm having a hard time setting up WOL in this computer, maybe someone here can spot something wrong in my setup (and hopefully this is the right forum category).

I had OMV installed in an old HP computer. I want to move it to another old HP, but not so old (I'll call it "new" from now on). The motherboard is an OEM MSI JasmineR, with a crippled BIOS and apparently no manual available anywhere. But there is an option to enable WOL, so I thought I'd be OK. BIOS version seems to be the latest: v80.52.

First problem I found is the new computer wouldn't boot from the OMV system USB flash drive. I cloned it into a small hard drive and got it going. I'd still like to have it boot from the flash drive, but that can wait - WOL is my priority now.

After cloning the drive and booting, I ran omv-firstaid and set up the NIC. I requested to turn on WOL.

Second problem is it wouldn't hybernate, there was some error. I expanded the swap partition and fixed that.

Now I need to set up WOL. It was working in the old machine, but doesn't work in the new one. As I said, there's a BIOS option that says "S4/S5 Wake on LAN", and it's enabled. The only other option under "Hardware Power Management" is "SATA Power Management", which is also enabled. Under "Bus Options" there's "PCI #SERR Generation" and "PCI VGA Palette Snooping", both are enabled. Under "Device Options" there's "NIC PXE Option ROM Download", also enabled.

After booting, everything works fine. Hybernation seems to be fine too. But ethtool doesn't show me WOL mode:

(...)
MDI-X: Unknown
Current message level: 0x000060e4 (24804)
link ifup rx_err tx_err hw wol
Link detected: yes

And ethtool -i gives me this:

driver: alx
version: 5.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64
firmware-version:
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:02:00.0
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: no
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: no
supports-priv-flags: no

Any idea what else I could try? I'm wondering if it could be a driver problem. Would a clean install maybe take care of it? I'm reluctant to do that because there's a lot of tweaks I made to the current installation that I would have to do again. But if that's the recommendation, I'll do it.

Thanks in advance,

VMatn

Some new findings...

It seems this motherboard is equipped with an Atheros AR8161, which is affected by a bug in alx driver. I'm so lucky...

After some searches, I found this bug report in bugzilla. It's getting late now, I'll try to read more and maybe recompile the driver during the week. If anyone has a quick recipe to share, I'd appreciate it.

Forgot to mention, I'm running OMV 6.1.2-1 (Shaitan), with kernel Linux 5.16.0-0.bpo.4-amd64.

Thanks,

VMatn

Quote from olduser

I can't help you with your WOL problem, but unless you're having problems with a PCI or PCIe adapter, you can disable #SERR.

You can disable palette snooping unless you're using some ancient SGI accelerator, signage multiplexer, encoder adapter or something similar.

Hey olduser , I'm terribly sorry, I didn't see your reply until now, and I don't think I got a notification. Thanks for the info.

I had too much trouble with this setup. Maybe I did something wrong. Maybe I got a lemon. Among other things:

• I couldn't make it boot from USB (I tried really hard).
• I couldn't make WOL work with the built-in NIC (never tried to rebuild the driver though). I bought a PCI-Ethernet card and it worked, so I left it there. Not sure if it has created other problems...
• About that card, at some point the OS decided to rename it, not sure if it was something I did. But I had to reconfigure a couple of things with the new name, which was a bit annoying.
• Autoshutdown would fail 1 out of 4 or 5 times. Once or twice I woke up in the morning and found out the machine had stayed on since the previous day. It was pretty warm, fans at max speed, no SSH available, no console available. Looked like it tried to shutdown but something kept it running.
• Occasional hiccups while streaming video files to another machine (KODI/Libreelec PC). Video would freeze for 5-10 seconds, audio would stop too, then come back, then video would play faster to catch up with audio.
• Minor issue: the case is a mini-tower, and I had to pull some tricks to make all HDD's fit inside safely.

Two weeks ago I bought another computer, with an ASUS P8Z77-M. And with a larger case (it has 6 slots for HDD's with those twist-type locks, I love them). Spent some two hours setting it up, then another hour or so over the next couple of days to do a few more tweaks. I have had zero issues since then. Boots fine from USB, WOL works, Autoshutdown works, no video hiccups, nothing wrong.

I'll probably keep the JasmineR setup for a while, for experiments (right now I want to try LFS). If I don't use it for some time, I can probably sell it for the same price I paid, so my loss is only my precious time...

Thanks,

VMatn