Fwd: Graphical Shutdown

[Richi Plana]

On Tue, 2007-09-18 at 17:30 +0200, Leszek Matok wrote:
> Dnia 2007-09-17, o godz. 15:31:17 Simo Sorce <ssorce at redhat.com> napisał(a):
> 
> > > - kill -TERM $everything
> > > - wait a second
> > > - kill -KILL $everything
> > 
> > Do it with your services, don't try on mine :-)
> 
> If your service is going to break whenever it gets killed, it's also going to
> break whenever the power is lost, whenever the kernel panics and whenever I
> accidentaly push the button. I don't believe Fedora ships such broken
> software :)

There's a difference between powering down and losing power.

It's a fact of life that power loss can cause data loss. But that's
something that's usually accidental and unintentional. Not something
that might regularly be performed.

Shutting down by choice is like kill -TERM. Power loss is like kill
-KILL. With kill -TERM, you're giving the process the chance to do what
it needs to do to shut down cleanly. SIGKILL doesn't even give it the
chance to do anything and should only be used when the administrator is
reasonably certain that the process can no longer exit cleanly with any
of the other signal(7)s ... OR when the process absolutely has to die
like in shutdowns. Some shutdown policies state (though unspoken) that
shutting down the machine is a higher priority over assuring clean exits
(as seem to be the case with Desktops).

Of course, when the service is extremely important (servers where data
integrity has a high monetary figure attached), then they would most
likely opt for a different policy.
--

Richi Plana