It's not a disaster because I seldom want to reboot. My normal usage pattern these days is to switch on Slackware in the morning and switch it off around 18.00 hours. But sometimes I want to switch systems and that means rebooting.

The initial stages of the reboot (those that are controlled by the kernel) work normally. X shuts down, I see closing messages from syslog, and then the screen goes black. I assume this means that video memory has been cleared. But then things just stop. The darned UEFI must have been given some kind of "Reboot!" instruction but doesn't obey as it used to do.

If I briefly switch off at the main and on again, then of course it reboots. But that is really a cold boot complete with POST.

It's old hardware, bought second-hand as I buy all my stuff. But I'm curious all the same to know what is supposed to happen next during a reboot and why it's not happening. Is there anything I could do to find out?

PS: Good thing I'm not running Windows! You have to reboot that every time something updates.

Do you have installed kexec-tools by chance? kexec may serve as a replacement for reboot of sorts.

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Thanks, I'll look into that. I do have kexec set in the kernel but I don't yet have the tools.

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If I assume you are using a GUI to reboot, maybe try from the command line(?).

What I'm actually using is the buttonbar app that I wrote years ago. It's called barbarella. You have a line of buttons and they trigger what are basically shell calls. So the "reboot" button launches "sudo shutdown -r now". We're not talking display managers or upower here, nothing so complicated!

Hazel, I have absolutely no idea if this might help. From what I can see of it, you're far more knowledgeable than I; I'm just a "bodger".....you compile your own kernels, etc..!

I found this re-boot/shutdown sequence "explainer" over at StackExchange:-

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...ork-internally

If of no use, just tell me to butt out; I sha'n't take offense!

(I use summat similar to your "barbarella" in Puppy; a tray 'button' that launches a small YAD-powered GUI with basic system calls....shutdown, re-boot, re-start "X", re-start window manager, etc.)


Mike.

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Thanks! That's exactly what I wanted. But it will take a while to read it and follow all the links. Right now I mainly want to know what is going on. If it can be fixed, that would be nice too.

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This didn't happen to start after an update?

I don't think it's system dependent because yesterday I booted LFS to do my monthly Slackware dump and then tried to reboot immediately into Slackware and it misbehaved in the same way. And that system hasn't been updated for more than a year!

If it does it for both lfs and slackware and lfs hasn't been update for over a year would suggest a hardware, bios or hard drive problem.

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That's exactly what I thought and it's why I posted this thread in the hardware forum. But I don't think it's anything to do with the hard drive. Hard drive problems would affect cold boots too. It has to be the UEFI misbehaving. There must be a architecture-specific instruction that puts something into a register somewhere to tell the BIOS or UEFI that a reboot is required, and that's not being honoured.

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What happens if you boot into console, no X and reboot?

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I've installed it in Slackware and had a look at the man page. I think it's really designed for rebooting the same system with a new kernel. You could boot a different system by using appropriate command line options but it looks like your existing system wouldn't shut down cleanly unless you had a special shutdown script that called kexec -e instead of halt or reboot. I suppose I could create a script like that if someone held my hand.

No idea! But since I start X from the console and go back to the same console when X terminates, I don't see how it could make any difference.

I can take these as done, I suppose but have you

1. checked permissions
2. Issued 'reboot -f' as root?
3. Looked for stale files?