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

[Pascal Terjan]

On Thu, Aug 9, 2012 at 8:25 PM, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
> '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.

The behavior has been incorrect for more than 10 years and everyone
uses it like that.
What is the point of changing the behavior in a way that will make it
do something bad and annoying for most users?