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For Wake-on-LAN (WoL) and Wake-on-Wireless (WoW) computer must be only suspended or could be completely powered off? Assuming, the PC box is plugged into mains all the time.
Are there any differences between operating systems?
I am mainly interested in Wake-on-Wireless (WoW) on Linux.
I always assumed that, WoW, if not also WoL, requires computer to be only suspended to RAM, or some other low power state, but it cannot be fully switched off, or hibernated. During suspend to RAM computer needs obviously some power intake to keep memory content, so wifi could be powered too, powered enough to react on magic packet.
On one hand tutorials, like on HowToGeek or LifeWire, make it sound like suspend is not necessary.
On the other hand Linux WoW documentation clearly says: Wake on Wireless is a feature to allow the system to go into a low-power state (e.g. ACPI S3 suspend) while the wireless NIC remains active and does varying things for the host, e.g. staying connected to an AP ... This sounds like WoW to work, PC cannot be switched off and system has to have working suspend/resume.
That is not good news to me. After a month of struggling with getting my box to suspend and resume under Linux I am about to give up; I suspect the Broadcom proprietary drives form my bcm4360 are suspend-unfriendly.
From all information I was able to gather so far, from that little information I was able to gather, you are most likely right. Sadly. WOW seems to be much less fickle and definitively less supported generally. – Espinosa – 2019-04-10T22:57:03.417
If you think about it little deeper (of how the things actually work in WOW situation), it is quite normal like this, and for sure will not be much of a "hype" since it is not actually a "waking up" what's happening for WOW, since most of the system is already running to keep the wireless card active. That's why no support, cause it is actually not a "functionality", since the system would not make much of a difference between waking up by a mouse movement (for example), or a keyboard pressed, or a wireless network signal; "trigger" is different, but the action is the same! – Felix_ro – 2019-04-11T10:04:12.970