Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472 with a side project of the week. Let’s get started!
Booting Without the Power Button
I retired my laptop as a server primarily over a broken load-bearing clip on the screen’s bezel. As I now have to be more careful than I can be in regular use, I want to minimize how often I open or close the lid. The power button is under the lid. A month or so ago, I told it to reboot over Cockpit, a web admin interface, and the web interface remained down. Only this week did I open the lid to the background of my login screen.
Without considering the actual problem, I marched along research for booting with lid closed. Options for this kind of thing are either limited or use different keywords than I think of. My options consolidated into the following: “Wake on LAN,” “Wake on USB,” “Wake on AC.” Wake on LAN allows other computers to power on a device with a special packet. Wake on USB was an option I found for the look-see in my BIOS under a similar name, but its help description implied it was only for when the computer was asleep and would work for a cold boot or perhaps even with Linux.
Wake on AC is an option I have witnessed before and even used without understanding it for a fair booth I once helped with long ago when it was defaulted on for a system. I reached out to multiple places for help with this one, and am still to hear back. No option appears in my BIOS menu, but rumors exist about hidden options or recovery modes. I have been unsuccessful in accessing any such modes so far.
Open Source BIOS Replacements
While it’s easy to think of BIOS as essentially part of the hardware, it’s actually a category of software called firmware, and it can be swapped out like an operating system. On the other hand, open source BIOS alternatives suffer from the same challenges as replacement operating systems for smartphones: every model of motherboard potentially has a tailored BIOS to run it, meaning it can take a while reverse engineer and get working properly.
My I focused my attention on two projects called Coreboot and Libreboot (Libre-boot, not Lib-reboot). Both are open source projects. Coreboot is willing to grab proprietary, closed-source blobs of binary data to increase their availability to enthusiasts. Libreboot’s mission is 100% open source booting at the cost of more extensive work to communicate with different chipsets. Neither project lists my laptop model as supported. On the other hand, I recognized System76 on Coreboot’s list of vendors.
All I wanted was to boot without my power button. Is that too much to ask?
Takeaway
In the end, I worked on the wrong problem this week. I misdiagnosed my symptoms with a valid concern, but even if I pulled it off this week, Cockpit still does not start until I’m logged in, and that’s kind of important when physical access is less than immediate.
Final Question
Have you ever gone off working on an issue you hadn’t actually run into yet?
I look forward hearing your answers on in the comments below or on my Discord server.