powerdown restarts

[Bill Davidsen]

Mateusz Marzantowicz wrote:
> On 30.06.2012 23:32, Aaron Konstam wrote:
>> On Sat, 2012-06-30 at 08:36 -0700, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>>> On 06/30/2012 03:51:45 AM, Mateusz Marzantowicz wrote:
>>>> On 29.06.2012 22:37, Geoffrey Leach wrote:
>>>>> This problem has been submitted to Bugzilla (836657), but I thought
>>>> I'd
>>>>> ask here to see if there are any fixes lurking.
>>>>>
>>>>> System is running 3.4.3-1.fc17.x86_64. When I systemctl poweroff
>>>> the
>>>>
>>>>> kernel reboots instead of powering off. Under Windows 7, power off
>>>>> works as expected. All packages are up-to-date.
>>>>>
>>>>> Any ideas?
>>>> What about shutdown -h ? Does it work as expected? Then try halt and
>>>> poweroff commands.
>>> It's my understanding that poweroff is a backwards-compatibility
>>> implementation of systemctl poweroff, which I have tried to no avail. I
>>> should have mentioned that. It appears that halt is the same. shutdown
>>> if a link to systemctl. Bottom line is that I would not expect any of
>>> these to be any different, but I live in hope and will report back if
>>> there's any difference.
>>>
>>> I should also mention that systemctl poweroff works fine on my laptop
>>> running the 32-bit version of Fedora 16.
>>>
>>> One point, FWIW. Power off is essential for my application. Merely
>>> halt-ing is no better than just leaving the system running.
>>>
>>> Thanks. I don't wish to seem ungrateful -:)
>>>
>>>
>> I disagree with the other posters. There is a magic related to shutdown
>> poweroff and halt. If you look at the man pages you will find that
>> shutdown and poweroff have different options. It is clear that when
>> systemctl is called under a different name it checks the name and
>> potentially reacts differently. For example poweroff by itself will
>> shutdown the machine . systemctl called by itself will not.
>
> If you check source code with is more reliable then any man page could
> ever be, you will find that there really is nothing magical. Please see
> file src/systemctl/systemctl.c in systemd source tree. Commands like
> halt, shutdown and power off call the reboot() function. I can agree
> that argument to reboot() may change between this calls but it's still
> the same function they're calling.
>
Source code shows what the source code says, testing shows what it does.

I have several systems which either reboot or drop to some zombie mode on 
shutdown from the WM (GNOME3, XFCE, Cinnamon) and on all of them
"shutdowen -h" doesn't power off (as the man page says is optional)
while "shutdown -P" does.

So there is a problem, and while I generally agree that no matter how you get 
the the system call it will do the same thing, clearly some user interfaces do 
not call powerdown as part of shutdown.

Don't know if that makes it a system issue or a user inteerface issue, but 
hopefully that tip will give people a way to really power the damn thing off.

Oddly, hibernate does power down on all those systems, although as usual they 
don't reboot cleanly.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot