From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; MSOCD) Description of problem: I have a RH 7.2 box. It has all the latest patches, including the latest kernel. When I am running the smp kernel, the machine hangs when I try to shut it down. Namely, I get the "Power Down" message and then it hangs. This happens even when apm is not running (which it never does on my workstation). It never happens when I run the single processor kernel. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Boot machine with smp kernel 2.log in 3.poweroff or shutdown -h now Actual Results: The machine hangs at "Power Down." Then I turn it off by hand (not a good solution!) Expected Results: The machine should have turned off itself. Additional info: THe machine is a Dell Precision 530 with 2 xeon 1.7g processors.
Ah. Automatic poweroff is disabled by default on SMP machines because power off requires APM bios services, and the 1) vast majority of SMP bios writes don't know how to spell APM and 2) APM is not SMP safe by design. There is an override where you can tell the kernel that you trust your bios, just append the text apm=power-off to the "vmlinuz" line in the /boot/grub/grub.conf
Sorry, but this did not work. The machine still hangs when you add the line you suggested to grub.conf Michael
I am having the same problem using KDE and Grub on RedHat Linux 7.3. I have even tried to do all the updates and even a complete reinstall of it but with no luck. It still continues to do this. I have also tried the bigmem, smp, and the regular kernels and the same problem still continues.
If the BIOS lacks APM power off then we can't do anything about it