Re: Minor request for enhancement: "beep on halt"

Stephen Harris (sweh@spuddy.mew.co.uk)
Mon, 14 Dec 1998 21:06:04 +0000 (GMT)


Richard Gooch writes:
> Jason A. Pfeil writes:

> > Shutdown just calls a routine in the kernel to handle the shutdown before
> > it is killed itself. Therefore, this ability needs to be in the kernel

> Sorry, I don't agree. The shutdown(8) programme is what kills all
> processes, unmounts filesystems, remounts the root FS read-only, syncs
> the discs and then calls reboot(2) which halts/reboots.

Could this code be in shutdown(8) ? Hmm, no... there is always the
possibility that the kernel may need to perform some other "clean up" work.
Surely this is the concept behind the notifier_call_chain() calls inside
sys_reboot().

For example, the wdt driver turns off the card at shutdown time. If the
shutdown(8) program never calls sys_reboot() then the card is never turned
off, and a watchdog reset could occur. Not good :-) It could cause a
reboot! Some other drivers also hook into the reboot_notifier_list to
perform a cleanup on shutdown.

No... the kernel needs to perform a full shutdown, and so the "beep on
halt" has to be in the kernel.

Stephen Harris
sweh@spuddy.mew.co.uk http://www.spuddy.org/
The truth is the truth, and opinion just opinion. But what is what?
My employer pays to ignore my opinions; you get to do it for free.
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