[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#354163: apmd: Computer does not switch off any more

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:

I'm absolutely uneducated in this field but I try to add some
perhaps useful information here.

> I had a look at this problem, and as far as I an see, the kernel is
> the entity responsible for turning off the machine.  At the end of
> init.d/halt, 'halt -d -f -i -p -h is called, and this end up with a
> syscall 'reboot(RB_POWER_OFF)'.  I guess the problem is that this
> syscall do not turn off the power any more.  I have no idea why.

While the original bug report was about the problem that the box
is not switched of I would like to add that the problem also occurs
at a reboot.  If I try to reboot (without trying to power off)
the shutdown process stops at the very same point (obtained by
my poor knowledge from the printed text at console).  So some
process seems to be running before the reboot call you mentioned.

> Could it be that the kernel changed to try to call some user space
> programs using udev or similar before turning off the power?  udev is
> dead at this point, so that is doomed to fail.

I would like to add here, that this problem also occurs on machines
with kernel versions below 2.6.12 and no udev package installed.

> To test this hypotesis, I tested in qemu with
> <URL:http://koltsoff.com/pub/reboot4fun/poweroff.c> (random link I
> found via google), and this did not shut down qemu, even if all user
> space programs were running as normal.  I was using debian kernel
> 2.6.17-1-686.  I also tested this on an old ubuntu installation with
> kernel 2.6.10-5-386, and there the machine powered down.
>
> Could this be apm/acpi related?  I suspect it is.

I might remember that the problem occures on ACPI enabled machines
as well as on older boxes that only know APM.

As I said the problem is between initscripts_2.86.ds1-10_i386.deb and
initscripts_2.86.ds1-11_i386.deb.  I'm currently work happily
with a initscripts_2.86.ds1-10_i386.deb set on hold.

Kind regards

         Andreas.

-- 
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