Bug 456418

Summary:	reboot man page missing kexec interaction info
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Tom Horsley <horsley1953>
Component:	sysvinit	Assignee:	Bill Nottingham <notting>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	10	CC:	rvokal
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2008-12-08 20:27:18 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Tom Horsley 2008-07-23 13:53:50 UTC

Description of problem:

The reboot man page is missing any reference to kexec. (And the kexec man
page is missing any reference to reboot), yet kexec and reboot apparently
do interact in highly beneficial ways it would be really good to have
documented somewhere. Vague hints in google searches and experimentation
eventually led to the discovery that the sequence:

kexec -l ....
reboot

is the best way to cleanly shutdown a system and boot up a different (or the
same) kernel from scratch without going all the way through the BIOS boot
sequence.

Since this is radically different behavior than the normal reboot action,
it seems like it ought to be documented in the reboot man page.

Once the reboot man page is updated, it wouldn't hurt anything to add
a see also in the kexec man page pointing to reboot.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

sysvinit-2.86-18.x86_64 is the package that owns the reboot man page,
so that's what led me to this bug category.

Comment 1 Bill Nottingham 2008-07-23 14:07:00 UTC

Using kexec

1) requires a relocatable kernel
2) requires the kexec tools
3) requires that you have hardware that inits correctly from a warm boot

Ergo, I'm not sure that having it as the default mechanism is good.

Comment 2 Tom Horsley 2008-07-23 14:28:32 UTC

I didn't say anything about making it the default for reboot, I just said
that it would be nice if the way kexec and reboot already do interact was
actually documented somewhere :-).

Comment 3 Bug Zapper 2008-11-26 11:02:12 UTC

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Comment 4 Bill Nottingham 2008-12-08 20:27:18 UTC

Thinking about this again (sorry about the delay) I don't think the reboot man page is the best place for this - this is probably better handled in a HOWTO or similar; especially since we don't recommend kexec for the normal reboot case.