Intel® vPro™ Technology

  Section 6 of 13  

Mobile Manageability in Low-Power and Operating-System-Absent States

Wake on LAN (WoL)

The first attempt at managing computers in Sx states remotely comprised the following. If the platform is in an Sx state, and IT personnel want to manage it, they need some sort of hook to allow them to pull the platform out of the Sx state and into the S0 state. From that point, the computer can be managed by IT personnel remotely.

That hook was “Wake on LAN” (WoL). WoL was developed as part of Intel’s “Wired for Management” initiative, for which specification version 2.0 was published in December 1998 [2]. WoL required that a LAN (wired network) adapter be powered in Sx states, and that some basic hardware logic be included in the LAN adapter that could assert a hardware signal that would wake up the platform and put it into the S0 state. The WoL standard defined a “magic packet”. A WoL-supporting LAN adapter receiving a magic packet in an Sx state would interpret the packet as a request from the network to wake up the platform to the S0 state. Other packets could also be used for that purpose.

Subsequently, WoL was extended to other types of network adapters. For example, Wireless LAN (WLAN) adapters could support a similar capability, termed “Wake on WLAN” (WoWLAN).

Note that with WoL and its derivatives, the actual manageability logic could still be run on the main CPU (that is, in software).

  Section 6 of 13  

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