Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R enables wake on any unicast packet by default

Recently I found that if I totally cut power to my computer (including standby power), booted to Linux and went into suspend, it would wake unexpectedly very soon. Booting into Windows would prevent this problem from happening until power is totally cut again. I suppose this problem existed before, but I never noticed it because I rarely fully cut power and I was using Linux less.

At first I thought this was a Linux bug, but actually, it the result of a crazy default setting for wake on LAN. By default, wake on unicast packet and magic packet are both enabled. If there was some network activity which caused ordinary unicast packets to arrive while the computer was sleeping, it woke up. That's why I found that with a minimal X setup using twm, the wakeups only happened if I was running a web browser.

This setting can be seen by running sudo ethtool eth0. Its output included:

        Supports Wake-on: pumbg
        Wake-on: ug

From the ethtool man page:

              u Wake on unicast messages
              g Wake on MagicPacket™

The solution was adding ethtool -s eth0 wol d to /etc/rc.local to disable wake on LAN. Then sudo ethtool eth0 would report Wake-on: d, which means "Disable (wake on nothing).". It's possible to also use g instead of d, which should only enable wake on magic packet.

The GA-P35-DS3R rev 1.0 motherboard F13 BIOS does not seem to have any options for changing wake on LAN settings, so this seems to be the only way to do it. I had already disabled wake on LAN in Windows via the Advanced settings in Device Manager. That setting persisted until standby power was cut.

It sure seemed like a Linux bug at first, so here's the Ubuntu bug I reported. Now I just wish Linux would tell me the wake reason. If something told me these wakeups were a result of wake on LAN, I would have wasted a lot less time on this.