In a message dated 1/14/2007 9:01:38 P.M. Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
It has been doing dumb things like this for a long time now. It was a MAJOR stupid mistake to ever try to work around this on userspace (userspace simply does not know enough to get it right always, and it simply *cannot* do it in suspend-to-disk, and other corner cases), and it will take two or three years before we manage to fix it and remove the "do it in userspace by default" crap halt(8) has to carry around. I agree heartily, userspace ought provide the 'why', the kernel the 'how' and 'when'. There isn't anything in '/sbin/halt' that might not better be a boot up parameter with defaults, and 'halt' just reduced to a stub that forces parameter changes if need be then makes one OS call. File systems ought to know to flush their caches and otherwise handle shutdown/restart/sleep/resume. Block device drivers should be smart enough to sync on their own when idle for more than a minute, and if necessary on all warnings of power / bootup state changes. Though new to linux, is there no little pool of 'kernel worker threads' that drains a 'to do' queue? I sense the 'resort to user space' might have its roots there, a desire for non-blocking or parallelism in these system state change tasks. Harry Coin
