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Description of problem:
Even this might sound very strange, I would like to see an option for 
poweroff(1)/reboot(1) to describe why a shutdown/reboot takes place,
similar like the Microsoft Windows shutdown event tracker. When doing
server maintenance on production systems, I treat it as helpful to know
at a later point when scrolling through the logs why a reboot happened.

Upstream link: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/1029/files

I could imagine something like this:

  reboot -m "Security update of kernel"

Or:

  poweroff -m "Replacement of defunct NIC"

So the goal would be to have this message finally logged in systemd's
journal (or /var/log/messages). I don't know if it makes sense to even
introduce predefined groups (which autofill -m), but my personal needs
would be satisfied with above. I indeed could call logger(1) or so, but
it would be nice to have it along with the command that I run anyway.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
systemd-208-20.el7_1.5.x86_64

Actual results:
No option for poweroff(1)/reboot(1) to describe why a shutdown/reboot
takes place.

Expected results:
Option for poweroff(1)/reboot(1) to describe why a shutdown/reboot takes
place.

*** Bug 1022191 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Already upstream (see https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9ef15026c0e7e6600372056c43442c99ec53746e + related commits later).

For RHEL-7, the backport would need a lot more additional testing.

This is the set of patches we need to backport (in that order):
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/9ef15026c0e7e6600372056c43442c99ec53746e
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/5744f59a3ee883ef3a78214bd5236157acdc35ba
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/3d1c455f9a898e7427b642800644ae7142dc7557
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/91b3e7fb6c0b24a8d258c710304d50a45f90568a
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/f2d11d35e90d5143d2bc6103ff451778909644f0
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/7089051f67e969a524bde5a7f264491a0373f7e5

I just realized that backporting is not possible, because, in RHEL7, we still use systemd-shutdownd... Unless there's a strong business reason, we will not re-implement the functionality in RHEL7.