From: jwinstea@fenris.claremont.edu (Jim Winstead Jr.)
Subject: Re: Ctrl-Alt-Del & reboot/halt weirdness
Organization: Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 18:02:59 GMT

In article <phrn4dk.harp@netcom.com> harp@netcom.com (Gregory O. Harp) writes:
>
>Oh, I use BootLin to go into Linux.  I'm not anxious to go fiddling
>with my MBR, since I need this machine for business.

I can understand your reluctance, but using LILO as your MBR really is
quite painless.  You can try it out by not making it your MBR, but
instead making it the boot sector of your Linux root partition, and
selecting that partition as active - no mucking with anything
important there.

>Anyway, whenever I do a shutdown or reboot, I get a lockup 
>instead.  The following is the output I get when I use these
>commands (I added the indention):
>
>	URGENT: message from the sysadmin:
>	System going down IMMEDIATELY!
>
>	in:
>	        ...  ...
>
>	down IMMEDIATELY!
>
>	in:

Where did you get shutdown from?  It looks like it may be corrupt, or
doing something else strangely.  It certainly shouldn't print messages
like the above.

>No, you're not seeing things.  That's it.  Happens every time.  Then,
>in the case of reboot, things lock up.  I sometimes even get trash on
>the screen.  In the case of halt, it eventually tells me I can shut
>down, then it locks.  I always have to do a hard reset whenever I
>leave Linux (unless, of course, I just turn the machine off).

Well, halt is supposed to just lock up the machine - after doing all
the normal shutdown stuff (warning users, umounting partitions) it
just goes into an infinite loop.  I'm not sure what the default
behavior for shutdown is, but I think that will just 'halt' the
machine by default, too.  If that's true, only the reboot command
really should do a reboot.

>Well, turning off BIOS shadowing isn't a good solution for me.  While
>Linux doesn't use it, I still have to use DOS/Windows occasionally on
>this machine.  In fact, I will probably be using this machine for my
>next contract, and the performance hit I take under DOS for not having
>the BIOS shadowed is large.  Turning BIOS shadowing on/off every time
>I switch OSes isn't such a hot idea, either...

QEMM will do BIOS shadowing for you, if you're using that - it'll just
map the ROMs to RAM, and you end up with the same type of speed up.
Otherwise, I personally wouldn't find it that inconvenient to be
'forced' to do a hard reset every time I wanted to quit Linux.  Right
now I get an instant reboot from quitting Windows (yes, under DOS)
that I've learned to cope with.  :)

>BTW, playing with the bus I/O speed had no effect on the problem.
>There was no "Fast A20 Gate" feature like the previous poster had
>mentioned in my setup...
>
>Any other ideas on how to solve these problems?

Really, without keeping the BIOS shadowing off, I can't think of
much.  Upgrading your BIOS might be an option, but not necessarily a
very reasonable one.  There were also patches for having the kernel do
the reset in a different way at one time, but I don't know what has
become of those or whether they would even help.
-- 
                                    +      Jim Winstead Jr. (CSci '95)
                                    |      Harvey Mudd College, WIBSTR
                                    |   jwinstea@jarthur.Claremont.EDU
                                    + or jwinstea@fenris.Claremont.EDU
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux