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

Thu Aug 9 21:32:04 CEST 2012

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?
+