Dell 710 Hangs on Shutdown

[Jeff]

When I shut down from my user account, the system hangs after the message "Stopping samba daemons... [ OK ]". At that point the system does not respond to anything except holding down the power button for five seconds. When I shut down as root, the system hangs after the message "Stopping bus messaging daemon dbus [ OK ]". It sits indefinitely until either CTL-ALT-DEL or a single press of the power button force reboot or shutdown. This problem seemed to start randomly without any new packages added. Any help is much appreciated.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately we can't fix it, because your description doesn't yet have enough information.
Please include as attachments the following additional information, if you have not already done so (please pay attention to lspci's additional options), as required by the Ubuntu Kernel Team:
1. Please include the output of the command 'uname -a' in your next response. It should be one, long line of text which includes the exact kernel version you're running, as well as the CPU architecture.
2. Please run the command 'sudo dmidecode > dmidecode.log' and attach the resulting file 'dmidecode.log' to this bug report.
For your reference, the full description of procedures for kernel-related bug reports is available at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeamBugPolicies . Thanks in advance!

[Jeff (jeffbarrettis)]

uname -a:
Linux i710 2.6.20-15-generic #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

 status confirmed
 importance medium
 assignee ubuntu-kernel-team

[Tim Gardner (timg-tpi)]

This seems quite similar to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/114854. You can quickly test this hypothesis by adding 'reboot=b' to the kernel boot command. The easiest way is to catch it at the grub menu, enter 'e' to edit the boot entry, then 'e' to edit the kernel command. Replace 'quiet splash' with 'reboot=b'. If that works, then try a test kernel to make sure it is fixed:

wget http://people.ubuntu.com/~rtg/linux-image-2.6.20-15-generic_2.6.20-15.28_i386.deb
sudo dpkg -i linux-image-2.6.20-15-generic_2.6.20-15.28_i386.deb

[Jeff (jeffbarrettis)]

I tried the 'reboot=b' kernel command without any luck. Just to make sure I understood you and did the test correctly, this is what I did:

I entered the grub menu and pressed 'e' to edit my default kernel.
I next selected Kernel command and pressed 'e' again.
I then replaced 'quiet splash' with 'reboot=b'.
Finally I pressed 'b' to boot.

The system booted with full messages rather than the ubuntu splash as expected. Once it was up, I logged into my user account and attempted to shut down. The same error occurred.

[Tim Gardner (timg-tpi)]

The way that you edited the grub menu on the fly looks correct.

There are 3 other reboot options that you can try:

 reboot=w
 reboot=c
 reboot=h

Let me know if one of these works.

[Jeff (jeffbarrettis)]

Tried all four reboot types without any effect. :o(

[Sergio Tosti (zeno979)]

Hardy is also seems to be affected but we have found a workaround:

remove the -i flag from the /etc/init.d/reboot and /etc/init.d/halt scripts

this is working for ubuntu server 8.04

--Sergio

[Beau Bechdol (bbechdol)]

"Hardy is also seems to be affected but we have found a workaround:

remove the -i flag from the /etc/init.d/reboot and /etc/init.d/halt scripts

this is working for ubuntu server 8.04

--Sergio"

Can you eloberate on this please I dont know what you mean remove the "-i" flag. I am haaving this exact issue too.

Thanks!!
Beau

[Sergio Tosti (zeno979)]

If you look at reboot man page tou can see:
" -i Iterates configured network interfaces and brings them down before shutting down. On Linux, this is unnecessary
              as the kernel will do this anyway."
so you can remove the "-i" flag from the init script where the call shutdown and halt.
I'll attach the patch for ubuntu 8.04.

--Sergio

[Sergio Tosti (zeno979)]

Here's the patch for the warkaround

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

This will change shutdown behaviour for all existing hardy installations, which is too risky in an SRU (it might break things for other people), at least as long as this hasn't been done in any stable release. So if that's the correct fix, it should be applied to jaunty, get widespread testing there, and then be backported.

However, it doesn't look like a "correct" fix to me in the first place. Why should samba hang or not just because the halt init script (which is run *after* any other init script) shuts down network interfaces? It shouldn't hurt at all to keep them up all the time.

What kind of network interfaces do you have? does it make a difference when you disconnect it before shutdown?

[Sergio Tosti (zeno979)]

You're right Martin, it's not a fix but a workaround for the problem, the strange thing is that manpages for reboot and halt say "On Linux, this is unnecessary as the kernel will do this anyway.", but removing the flag resolves the issue.
My server is in production, so I can't make more tests, if someone else affected by the problem can please give feedback. The NICs are 2 intel 82572EI Gigabit Ethernet and 2 Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet.
I haven't tested on newer kernel (Intrepid).