hi, good morning

asus 1225b netbook, slackware 14.1

when issuing 'shutdown -h now' always the machine will go through the shutdown procedure, however some times it will not power off ('power down is last message') and sometimes it will.

When it does not, the last message is 'remounting root file system read only' and there it hangs until power button is pressed (or ctrl alt + del).

Im wondering if it has something to do with NFS mounts, but during shutdown it looks like NFS is being taken care of.

If anyone can suggest what to check, where to look or has a solution then that would be appreciated as a reply please.

regards
Habs


As an aside, I am not sure of the consequence of pressing the power button when it hangs, but one thing I have noticed is sometimes the NTP may be affected and on reboot the time is wrong.

My understanding is that acpi needs to be functional to power off the machine. The symptoms you describe match a machine that does not have acpi functioning. That is, the system shuts down but it won't power off.

The first place to look is at the BIOS settings of the computer to see if acpi is enabled.

acpi may also be turned off in the kernel if the kernel parameter to turn off acpi in the kernel was issued (acpi=off).

Note that acpi (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) is not the same as apic (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller). It's easy to get them mixed up.

Perhaps others familiar with your specific netbook will have other suggestions.

Edit: Because your system sometimes "hangs" there may be something else going on other than acpi not functioning.

Does the box shutdown correctly if the NFS is unmounted before issueing shudown? I had a debian system that would hang on shutdown if samba shares wasn't unmounted before running shutdown. If I remember right the problem was the network card was being shutdown before the the share was unmounted. It might be a similar situation.

does it hang with a 'poweroff' command?

Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I am struggling to understand it being a ACPI issue (ACPI is 'on' I believe, as other functions are active), because sometimes it does shutdown correctly. If it is ACPI then these type of inconsistent faults are hard to sort out. Any further views?

In terms if using 'poweroff', yes it has worked and not worked just like with 'shutdown'. My understanding of 'poweroff' is that it usually uses 'shutdown -h' unless there is cause not to.

I will try to see about unmounting NFS first. I still feel NFS is favourite to be causing shutdown issues, but I am clueless as to why as there are no messages or log entries. In a stock Slack install, how would/could/should I ensure the 'correct' order of shutdown processes... ie. making sure NFS shutdown is called before network etc ?

Thank you again for your input.

I seem to remember that the -h option is vague can be either halt or power down based on what the system reports that it supports and -H option is for halt, so try to issue the -P option instead to cause the system to always attempt to power down.

Can you post the output of 'dmesg' and '/sbin/lspci -k'. It would be even better if you posted the logs from when it fails to shutdown.

I'll hazard a guess this is actually a hardware issue. The loss of date info is a confirming symptom. At minimum the CMOS battery on your motherboard has exceeded its effective lifespan. CMOS battery is easy to replace, but if that does not fix it you are probably looking at a replacement board (at least unless you are really friendly with circuit boards, magnifying optics, and soldering irons in which case I am guessing you would have already thought of this.)

Thanks for all the replies. i'm going to monitor this over a bit of time. the logs mentioned are not showing anything to me of consequence, but that may be me not knowing what to look for.

I did read another post suggesting an NFS issue, but I'm not sure.

Was puzzled on the suggestion it is a 'hardware' issue. The asus 1225b is not and old machine (relatively speaking) in my opinion so im not sure about the battery suggestion...although i'll give it go.


On the forum house-keeping side, Im not sure how to park/close this thread off...do I mark it as 'solved', or 'parked' or just leave it ?

What driver does the ethernet card use ?

RTL8105e driver: r8169 please can I ask what you suspect ?

I had a similar issue with the e1000e driver, but you're not using it.