Tumbleweed on ESXi 5.1: is halt supposed to fail, but halt -p supposed to work?

English Virtualization
1

A long time ago, I wrote about halt not functioning on OpenSuSE 12.x, but halt -p to work correctly on an ESXi 5.1 VM: http://wiert.me/2012/12/30/opensuse-12-x-a-plain-halt-will-not-shutdown-the-system-properly/

Since then the note has been removed from the release notes: https://doc.opensuse.org/release-notes/x86_64/openSUSE/13.2/ and https://doc.opensuse.org/release-notes/x86_64/openSUSE/12.3/

However, I still can reproduce this to fail, see my install notes: https://github.com/jpluimers/OpenSuSE.Tumbleweed.Server-Install/blob/master/README.rst

Is this by intent?

–jeroen

2

I don’t know about others, but from my wee days I was instructed to never issue a bare “halt” command by itself because its success would depend on too many complex processes successfully stopping on their own to succeed. If you really wanted to issue a halt and be certain it succeeded quickly, you always needed to issue an appropriate flag to make it happen.

Even today in 13.2, I’ve written here somewhere that a Desktop shutdown typically shuts down <very> quickly without allowing some processes to shut down gracefully which can be an issue (especially a database app which needs to properly allow all transactions to complete).

TSU

3

Yes. “halt” is not, and never was, supposed to power off the system. It only shuts down (“halts”) the operating system.
That a plain “halt” powered off the system was actually a bug in openSUSE’s halt, that got fixed years ago (and is still fixed).

For powering off, you need to specify “-p” (“poweroff”), or you can also run “poweroff” instead, that is supposed to power off the system as the name implies.

Or rather, use “systemctl poweroff”.

From “man halt”:

**NOTES**       These are legacy commands available for compatibility only.