Bug#405870: [Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#405870: sysvinit: halt binary missing ifdown, br...

[HarryCoin at aol.com]

In a message dated 1/14/2007 9:01:38 P.M. Central Standard Time,  
hmh at debian.org writes:

It has  been doing dumb things like this for a long time now.  It was a  MAJOR
stupid mistake to ever try to work around this on userspace  (userspace
simply does not know enough to get it right always, and it  simply *cannot*
do it in suspend-to-disk, and other corner cases), and it  will take two or
three years before we manage to fix it and remove the "do  it in userspace by
default" crap halt(8) has to carry  around.



I agree heartily, userspace ought provide the 'why', the kernel the 'how'  
and 'when'.  
 
There isn't anything in '/sbin/halt' that might not better be a boot up  
parameter with defaults, and 'halt' just reduced to a stub that forces parameter  
changes if need be then makes one OS call.
 
File systems ought to know to flush their caches and otherwise handle  
shutdown/restart/sleep/resume.
 
Block device drivers should be smart enough to sync on their own when idle  
for more than a minute, and if necessary on all warnings of power / bootup 
state  changes.
 
Though new to linux, is there no little pool of 'kernel worker  threads' that 
drains a 'to do' queue?  I sense the 'resort to user space'  might have its 
roots there, a desire for non-blocking or parallelism in these  system state 
change tasks.
 
Harry Coin
 
 
 
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