Does wake-on LAN/WOL depend on hardware or the operating system?

Does wake-on LAN/WOL depend on hardware or the operating system? Or both? How does one send a command to wake up a machine if it is supported (say a Fedora server)?

Thanks!

From serverfault studiohack

• Hardware, and the associated firmware that runs on that hardware. It is OS independent.

  There are a plethora of WoL utilities to send a "wake up" packet (sometimes called a Magic Packet). Try the port/package management system in your OS (or Google it). It's usually as easy as wol [MAC Address]

  From Chris S

• Wake On Lan involves sending a "magic packet" which contains the MAC address of the destination computer. There's a lot of detail here:

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

  The best way to send a WOL request from one Linux box to another is ether-wake. If you're looking for it in Fedora, install the net-tools package:

  $ yum whatprovides */ether-wake
  net-tools-1.60-102.fc13.x86_64 : Basic networking tools
  Repo        : fedora
  Matched from:
  Filename    : /sbin/ether-wake
  

  The syntax is pretty darned easy:

  ether-wake 00:11:22:33:44:55
  

  Just replace 00:11:22:33:44:55 with the MAC address of the machine you want to wake.

  From rackerhacker

• Both, the hardware is a fundimental requirement but the control of WoL is passed to the os on boot and the os could change if it works or not.

  Chris S : Please do not spam this website. Thank you. Also, wouldn't the computer have to be on before the OS could change anything? WoL simply turns the computer on, what happens after that has nothing to do with WoL.
  From Depicus