[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#501351: sysvinit: halt breaks wake on lan / WOL under NFS root /diskless lenny

[Harry Coin]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.86.ds1-61
Severity: important

Upgrading to lenny from etch has broken wake on lan after 'poweroff' on our many Dell Optiplex headless /diskless systems.  All packages are latest lenny/testing as of 6 October 2008.

Previously the systems would respond to etherwake 'magic packets'.  Now, they don't.  The adapters are 3c59x or e100 based, one per system. ethtool reports wake on lan is enabled.

Looking at the code I see that the latest network drivers always disable WOL after ifup and before ifdown. Then, either at driver unload time or ifdown time they set the WOL bit in hardware
 according to option.  However, when the root filesystem is NFS, the system halt doesn't do ifdown as when that is forced on under NFS root, that causes halt to hang waiting for now-disable
d NFS to satisfy calls - this blocks halt operations forever.

So, no ifdown when NFS root means the WOL enablement bits aren't set in the drivers -- breaking WOL.

The only way I got it to work under etch was to modify the drivers.  Also there was a problem in the binary halt distribution not calling ifdown, compling from standard source (same version
) did work (odd, that).

But the drivers have changed quite a bit since .18 and the right place to deal with this I think is above the driver level.   What network driver routine is always called even on NFS root s
ystems after it is certain no further kernel or userspace filesystem accesses will occur?  Either the halt routine has to change so it operates the same way NFS root or local root, or net d
river writers need to know for sure what the last driver call will be when powering off in an NFS root setup.

I was considering changing halt to create a tiny tempfs root file system, then doing a pivot_root to it inside halt so ifdown could proceed.  But the hack rating was just too high.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  initscripts                  2.86.ds1-61 Scripts for initializing and shutt
ii  libc6                        2.7-13      GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libselinux1                  2.0.65-5    SELinux shared libraries
ii  libsepol1                    2.0.30-2    Security Enhanced Linux policy lib
ii  sysv-rc                      2.86.ds1-61 System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils               2.86.ds1-61 System-V-like utilities

sysvinit recommends no packages.

sysvinit suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information