[WBEL-users] Shutdown / halt - manually shutting down.

[Kay Diederichs]

Kirby C. Bohling wrote:
> Alon,
> 
> 	Hmmm, I have used that same kernel and it will shut down no
> problem on my desktop machine.  What I have been informed of, and
> seems to be uniformially accurate, is that SMP kernels will *NOT*
> power down.  I've never seen a SMP kernel in the 2.4 series that
> did.  (I'm hedging, I can't remember if the 2.2 on RH6.2 would or
> not off hand).  Possibly I don't have the APCI or whatever enabled
> that is suggested later in this thread, but by default I've never
> seen an SMP kernel do it.  (For whatever it's worth, you aren't
> alone in the world).
> 
>     I've got a dozen SMP makes and models at work.  Not a one of
> them will ever shutdown.  They'll reboot no problem.  Shutdown, not
> a chance.  I have no idea why that is, but my guess is that if you
> booted the same machine w/ a uni-processor kernel, it'd shutdown
> fine.  I've never investigated the matter, I've just accepted it as
> a limitation.  Then pressed the power button.
> 
>     Thanks,
>         Kirby
> 
> PS:  Mutt seems to believe you are replying to a thread about IDE
> controllers.  If you are just replying to a handy message to avoid
> typing "whitebox-users at beau.org", it's very jarring to people who
> follow e-mail threads with clients that support it.
> 
> On Thu, Jun 09, 2005 at 04:21:54AM +0300, Alon wrote:
> 
>>Hi All,
>>
>>Everytime I do (well.. I don't do this too often) a:
>>
>>halt
>>or
>>shutdown -h now
>>
>>the system shuts down all the services nicely,. but at the end it just says:
>>Power Down
>>
>>and then I need to physically press the On/Off button to really shut it 
>>down.
>>I think when I used Fedora 1 or Knoppix (I just don't remember which one 
>>was it), it actually powered off.
>>Is this a bug? can this be fixed?
>>
>>I'm using Respin 1,.. updated to Respin 2
>>2.4.21-27.0.4.ELsmp
>>
>>
>>- Alon
>>js at wsco.com 
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Whitebox-users mailing list
>>Whitebox-users at beau.org
>>http://beau.org/mailman/listinfo/whitebox-users


I have a room full with dual-Athlons (Asus 760MPX) and Dell dual-Xeons all 
running RHEL3 clones w/ the RH 2.4 kernel or 2.4.29 from kernel.org . All of 
them have no problem shutting down and powering off.
I even have a line in root's crontab
0       20      *       *       *       if test -e /var/tmp/dontshutdown; then 
rm /var/tmp/dontshutdown; else /sbin/shutdown -h now; fi

which powers them off automatically in the evening unless a uses who wants to 
work in the evening creates the file "dontshutdown" in /var/tmp.

Thus, I would not say "SMP on 2.4 does not power off".

Kay