Reboot causes network card to fail

On some systems I have to do a poweroff and manual power on because a reboot may leave me without network connectivity. Why is that?
 
I have had the same problem recently, using FreeBSD 14.3 and the bce driver with multiple BCM5709 nics.
Everything has been fine for years, until about 2 months ago.
The problem only happens once in a while, not consistently, probably 1 on 5 reboots.
 
Some motherboards dont seem to powercycle the network port , probably because its potential use for wake-on-lan.
If Wake_On_Lan is to be active, I assume Lanport cant be completley offline. My Cisco C3560-Cx switch shows port active when
computer is off as long as the PSU is not turned off .

If the driver is dependant on a power cycled network chip to start cleanly .......
maybe you can unconfigure Wake-on-Lan, to check any difference in behavior.
 
When looking through unlocked BIOS options, I saw a few options for Ethernet WoL and Sx states: https://github.com/DavidS95/Smokeless_UMAF There's an interesting one under wireless for a workaround for resetting the card to prevent long POST. A WoL option for Ethernet sticks with CMOS resets implying it might set it hard in firmware, and surprisingly it was enabled by-default.

On Linux I do reboot=pci to force hard reboots; I like to assume it prevents odd stuff mainly with network firmware :p hw.efi.poweroff="0" might do that on FreeBSD?
 
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