Wake On LAN (WOL) speed setting

[idata]

Hi

I have a few rooms of PCs with Intel 82567LM-3 NICs in, and could really do with being able to set the network card speed when they are in power saving modes. The default is 10Mb, and this causes issues with certain multicast tasks.

Broadcom NICs have a "WOLSPEED" setting on the driver - but I cant see an option for anything similar on my Intel NICs.

TIA

[idata]

Is there anywhere I can post a feature request?

[idata]

Hi develop -

Consider your request received. Thank you for the suggestion. We are looking into how you can do what you are asking to do. Can you elaborate on the multicast issues you are seeing at 10Mbps, I am curious? Thank you for using Intel Ethernet.

Cheers,

-- miles

[idata]

Thanks Miles AFAIK its a deliberate "power saving" feature isnt it? A powered NIC on a PC that is off uses several times more power to link at 1Gb than at 10 or even 100Mb from what I have read.

The multicast issue is that if I have any off/sleeping machines on the same LAN that I am trying to use Ghost multicast on then Ghost will only run as fast as the slowest node on the network.

[idata]

develop -

Yes, what you are seeing is a power savings feature called "Reduce Speed On Power Down" which is by default enabled on most platforms by the system manufacturer. Based on your input we are looking into how to provide more flexibility to the user. Generally speaking, the power consumption increases for each link speed increase (i.e., 10GbE > 1GbE > 100Mbps > 10Mbps). Now it is not 10x power for each jump, but the power consumption is higher. When your system is sleeping there is a "power budget" for all devices that are somewhat active, and this includes LAN ports that are configured to Wake On LAN traffic.

Thank you for the input and request for additional flexibility.

Cheers,

-- miles

[idata]

*Any update on this? I am having some annoying WOL and multicast issues on Win7... 2008R2 with the same driver behaves, which is annoying... The driver shipped with the OS doesnt have WOL. The latest Dell Optiplex 960 (actually an Intel installer IIRC) breaks things like DHCP and has drops.

The original Dell supplied driver works best, but still drops (on W7) down to 10Mb during power saving. I tried to get round this by setting the (Netgear) switches to 1Gb only, but that then broke WOL as the card seems to switch off rather than negotiate to 1Gb! Argh! Set the switch back to Auto and you get 10Mb - which then makes all the local Ghost multicast traffic run at 10Mb... Not fun when you have rooms of 20GB images to push out on a regular basis.

*appreciate not much time has past but these machines are in production so I am looking for solutions and this seems the obvious one. Even setting to 100Mb would be fine when sleeping.

Message was edited by: develop

[idata]

Hi develop -

We are working on getting your request into our feature pipeline. In the mean time, you mentioned that you could restrict the autoneg advertisements on your netgear switch; is it possible for you to change the autoneg advertisements to include only 1GbE and 100Mbps settings? If so, this should make it so that you will link at 100Mbps while the machine is asleep rather than linking at 10Mbps.

The reason that 1GbE is not available when the system is sleeping is due to the system power availability when the system is sleeping. I could get to the specifics, but to maintain the 1GbE link while in a sleep state it will consume most of the available power budget for the machine.

I hope that your netgear switch will allow you to exclude 10Mbps in the autoneg advertisements. Let me know how that works out.

Thank you for using Intel Ethernet.

Cheers,

- miles

[idata]

Hi - thanks for the explanation there, it makes sense hearing why things are set as they are (sleep power budget).

Unfortunately I cant see a way to set my switches (Netgear GS724Tv2) to disable 10Mb, they only seem to allow a specific setting per port or auto... So for now the only way I can see is to set the ports to 100Mb (making everything equally slow) or have a NIC/BIOS option to not use 10Mb.

[idata]

Hi - possibly an obvious answer but anything to report yet?

[idata]

Hi

Did this ever get added to the feature pipeline?

If 1GbE is not available when sleeping then does that mean if its plugged into a switch that only supports 1GbE that it wont sleep?

I would just like 100Mb as an option, its such a pain to have to switch on every PC on the network just to do some multicasting. If you have seen the Symantec Ghost Console forums there are frequent posts from admins complaining about slow multicast speeds who probably havent realised what is going on. I did start replying to some but there is only so much time...

[idata]

Hi develop -

Thanks for posting back. Yes, your suggestion did make it into the pipeline and the ability to link at 100Mbps while the system is sleeping will be available in approximately a month. There will be an option to disable "Reduce Speed on Power Down" which was not available on all LAN on motherboards. I do not know the exact date yet of the release, but I will get some more details out as soon as I get them.

As for your question about switches that only support 1GbE. Yes, you will not be able to link to those switches when you sleep because maintaining a 1GbE link for wake up consumes too much power. Perhaps when Energy Efficient Ethernet is available this will change as idle connections will not consume full power when idle.

Thank you for your suggestions and thank you for using Intel Ethernet.

Cheers,

-- miles

[idata]

Hi Miles, I have several PC's with 82567LM-3. I'd like to change the WOL speed to 100M. Just wonder if the option you mentioned is available now. Where can I download the driver?

Regards,

--John

[idata]

Has this made it into the Intel driver yet?

Amazingly Dell just released a new driver for the Optiplex 960 and the changelog only states the addition of "Link Speed Battery Saver" being "disabled by default" but available in the driver properties in Windows. Seems a little odd as the Optiplex wouldnt normally run on batteries being a desktop PC (I guess you might have a UPS!) but also the driver option is missing when I installed over the previous one...

If the Intel direct driver has a sleep/off speed setting now that would be really useful. Ultimately though I fear its a (Dell) BIOS issue to truely fix it...

[idata]

HI develop -

Yes, support has been released and you should be able to see the option in the 16.3 release of the drivers available on http://www.intel.com www.intel.com. Unchecking the "reduce link speed during standby" will tell our LAN driver to allow for 100Mbps link when the system is in standby mode. You should see this in the "Power Management" tab.

Cheers,

-- miles

[vt5]

Thanks Miles, it worked, how about for S5 mode, current limitation is only 100mbps, any chance of getting it to 1Gb?

[idata]

I think S5 will be a BIOS/firmware fix by the OEM. Now its in the driver (at least from Intel) I might ping Dell to see if they can do anything.

I doubt 1Gb will be an option as mentioned earlier in the thread, there is only a certain amount of power available in S5 and linking at 1Gb might use too much. When you see how much it uses you can see why all these power saving options have been enabled/created.

[idata]

We have this issue here in a configuration center where we do LOTS of Multicast imaging.

Our solution has been to enable IGMP on our switches (which, yes, involed replacing a couple of switches). Enabling the IGMP forces the multicast packets to just the systems that are receiving them, so the 'off' systems don't slow down the other imaging sessions.

Otherwise, I'd check your switch to see if there is an option to set port speed to "Auto 100 1000."

[idata]

Hi - thanks for the tip. Unfortunately not all our switches are managed, and only have 100/1000/auto as an option even though they support 10... Blame Netgear... Blame Dell... Or get Intel to add a feature Broadcom offer? Its only the NICs that changed after upgrading PCs, the rest of the infrastructure is the same.