I've posted on this several times in the newbie forum, but it always draws a blank.

Basically, when booting from newer 2.6 kernels, my Compaq Armada responds differently to the shutdown -h or telinit 0 command. All services seem to terminate correctly, but the final power-down is audibly softer, and the machine seems to go into some kind of hibernate mode. It is then prone to wake up and start the boot process at random.

It seems to be a hardware conflict. So, what could the newer kernel have changed in a concrete sense? And where would I start to troubleshoot this? At the moment I am reduced to pulling out the machine's battery to prevent unwanted boot-ups...

Any help really really appreciated.

Rollo

Only thing I can think of is, did you select support for apm/acpi? If so, then is apmd or acpid running?

Thanks Con for that idea.

Yep, ACPI is activated as usual by the kernel, and works fine apart from this problem.

But killing the acpid process before doing a shutdown makes no difference to the nature of the shutdown. Why is this?

Can you post
$ uname -a

(it looks like you are running SUSE 9.1 - If I am not wrong there was a bug in that kernel that caused problem during shutting down in my laptop also. Why dont you try installing SUSE 10.0.

Thanks Bio for that.

Here's what I get with uname -a:

And yep, I'm using Suse 9.1. What could be interesting is that this problem only occurs with separately compiled kernels. Shutdown is problem-free with the Suse-packaged kernel.

What setting could be being adjusted in the Suse-compiled kernel?

i'd try compiling the new kernel using the same config file suse uses for their kernel... if that doesn't work either, then i'd suspect that they have applied some kinda special patch or something... big commercial gnu/linux distributors are known to do heavy patching of the kernel lots of times, so if you build a vanilla kernel (from kernel.org) some things will/might be different...

just my $0.02...

i had same problem a while ago.
but then i reinstalled debian sarge and updated kernel and it fixed it self.
i think it happend coz i edited the modules from another prob.and it just over went it self.

so i had to hold down the ON button for a few secs or long till it shut off.
because it used to just hang.

With some laptops you need to use the APM command to power down - there is a specific kernel menuconfig option to enable this call on ACPI laptops.

Power management options (ACPI, APM) --->
APM (Advanced Power Management) BIOS Support --->
[ ] Use real mode APM BIOS call to power off

Thanks guys for the ideas! Really appreciate it. Win32sux and Kosh, you're surely right about the causes of this. I would happily stick with the distro-built kernel. Only problem is, I need a recent kernel to get USB working on my laptop.

Kim, thanks so much for this tip. Hopefully this will be what I was looking for! Before I do the recompile, a couple of quick questions:

- Will checking this option cause APM to automatically override ACPI when shutdown is called? I thought you had to enable one or the other at boot time.

- Should I ignore the other options in this branch of the config tree? Specifically, any ideas about the option "Ignore USER SUSPEND"?

Thanks again.

Rollo