no poweroff on reboot or shutdown

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

My system recently picked up a bug where it won't poweroff when I issue either "reboot" or "shutdown -h now". In both cases, it goes through the normal shutdown steps, but halts without an error message at the power-off stage. This sounds nearly identical to this thread:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/264189/computer-doesnt-power-off-at-shutdown-reboot-arch

But their solution, adding "acpi=force" to GRUB_COMMAND_LINE_DEFAULT didn't work for me.

Unfortunately, I don't reboot that often, so I'm not sure when this first started, except that it was in the past few months, so it's hard to say when update(s) might have caused it.

Any ideas?

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

I also tried setting "acpi=off" in grub. To me, this seems counter intuitive, but I wanted to see what would happen. This had no effect on this issue, and the only change I can see is that the system isn't able to set the hardware clock at boot.

I also looked through the bio settings, and couldn't find anything that seemed related.

One other note: this system is dual-booted with windows, and, although I mostly just use linux, yesterday I had to boot into windows. Windows was able to poweroff without issues, so I doubt that it's a hardware problem.

entity · Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2024 6:27 pm Post subject:

I recently faced similar issue after system update. For me, it was

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

entity, thanks for chiming in, I'm still scratching my head on this one. I just tried rolling back to

amair · n00b Joined: 12 Aug 2003 Posts: 61

When I upgraded to sys-apps/sysvinit-3.08 I received this elog message:

entity · Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2024 1:16 pm Post subject:

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

Interesting... I just tried

wjb · Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2024 11:50 am Post subject:

Just add one line in ~/.bashrc and carry on as normal

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21669

Although the timing is unfortunate, it looks to me like OP's problem has nothing to do with the bug fix in sys-apps/sysvinit. OP specifically stated that he tried using the pre-fix version, and it did not help. Additionally, he has tried the elaborated invocation that is supposed to work in the post-fix version, and it does not help. I have used shutdown -h now successfully, and the system powered off, when using =sys-apps/sysvinit-3.08, a version which supposedly requires you to "do it right." Based on all this, I think OPs' problem is not in with the bug fix in sys-apps/sysvinit. Instead, this is some other problem. OP: if you increase the kernel's output verbosity, do the final lines left on screen provide anything useful? Does the sysrq that forces an immediate poweroff (without syncing, so you must save your data first!) turn off power in the bad case? Based on your kernel upgrade history, is there a last known good / first known bad kernel?

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

Hu, that's a neat trick, I didn't know about sysrq until now. If I force a shutdown with

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21669

jyoung · Guru Joined: 20 Mar 2007 Posts: 443

Sorry, yes, that was a typo. I was using

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21669

Good. That confirms this is a kernel problem. I have never seen a kernel that allowed use of sysrq-poweroff and failed to instantly kill power when that was used. Now that we know it is a kernel problem, you can either search backward to find when it last worked, or try a newer kernel to see if it is already fixed.

If you switch to a text console, raise the kernel's verbosity to maximum, and issue a sysrq-poweroff, is there any useful output? Normally, such output would be lost almost instantly when the system loses power, but perhaps there will be something useful shown on screen in your case.