[Mageia-dev] latest kernels not powering off machines on shutdown

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Thierry Vignaud at 09/08/12 19:29 did gyre and gimble:
> On 9 August 2012 20:18, Thierry Vignaud <thierry.vignaud at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I've the impression that for some time, kernels do not power off machines
>>> anymore on shutdown.
>>> The kernel prints "System halted." but the machine remains powered.
>>> I've seen that with VMs and with real PCs.
>>>
>>> Does someone else see that?
>>
>> Humm, in fact it looks like halt == shutdown -H now whereas in the
>> old days it was equivalent to "shudown -P" (which still works OK).
>>
>> Since "halt" is now provided by systemd, this is were the regression
>> come from...
> 
> I would suggests sg like this in order to restore previous behaviour


This has already been reported and I've simply closed the bugs and said
that I will not fix this.

What is the point in having two commands if they both do the same thing?
I actually find the halt command useful for ensuring the correct thing
happens on shutdown (e.g. that we re-enter the initrd and pivot root out
of the main filesystem to ensure /usr us unmounted and LVM/raid etc.
properly tidied up). If you cannot issue a halt, it's nigh on impossible
to debug these things, so a patch to systemd would be IMO be a very bad
idea. I wouldn't necessarily be completely against a patch that made
running "halt" work differently to "systemctl halt", but such a patch
would likely be ugly and it's certainly not going to be accepted
upstream and it means inconsistent behaviour and as a result I'd rather
just let people adapt to the current (and IMO correct) behaviour - I
still maintain the old behaviour was broken and this that systemd simply
restores what the behaviour should have been all along.

Col


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Colin Guthrie
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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