System hangs only on reboot before bios

GSF1200S · 2008-12-24 09:59:15

Arch has been awesome on this machine, bar this one inconvienience-

Pre-info: I use KDEmod legacy, latest updates, etc

If I select restart from KDE, or killall xinit and sudo reboot, the system will 8/10 times hang right before the bios screen is supposed to appear. Ive read this could be a bios issue, but fedora, zenwalk, ubuntu, and opensuse has never had this issue.

Im fairly sure its right before the bios should load, as Shutdown or sudo shutdown -h now works everytime to actually turn off the machine.

I took a look at dmesg and didnt see anything out of the ordinary, of course with init not even started yet, I would imagine it wouldnt show anything. All the filesystems seem to indicate they were cleanly shutdown, so I dont think its in the shutdown process.

The part that really confuses me is that 2/10 times, it actually WILL reboot just fine, which strikes me odd. Anyone have any ideas on what it is? Obviously a stab at a solution would be nice, but I would like to know whats causing it regardless... Let me know if you need any logs, etc..

If all else fails, Ill just reinstall- its easy enough and quite fun..

R00KIE · 2008-12-24 14:07:26

And by right before the bios screen you mean while arch is still shutting down or when the pc should be doing everything from the start as in a cold boot?

xxxspuddy · 2008-12-24 14:24:01

Are you using any kind of CPU frequency scaling, e.g using cpufreq? I had a similar issue, if the CPU frequency wasn't set to max I would have to powercycle the box to bring it back to life, but that was a few kernels ago...2.6.25 I think.

GSF1200S · 2008-12-25 15:32:02

xxxspuddy wrote:

Are you using any kind of CPU frequency scaling, e.g using cpufreq? I had a similar issue, if the CPU frequency wasn't set to max I would have to powercycle the box to bring it back to life, but that was a few kernels ago...2.6.25 I think.

Thank you very much for this- My box is doing exactly the same thing now as a result of cpufreq. The below fix took care of the problem. Dirty but it works...

In the future, for anyone else who may have this issue, you can edit /etc/rc.local.shutdown to include cpufreq commands. For example, mine looks like this:

/etc/rc.local.shutdown

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.local.shutdown: Local shutdown script.
#
cpufreq-set -c 0 -g performance && cpufreq-set -c 1 -g performance

Of course if you only have one core, you would omit the && and anything beyond.

When the computer comes up on the boot process, it checks /etc/conf.d/cpufreq and sets the policy to whatever governor youve selected.

Last edited by GSF1200S (2008-12-25 15:33:57)

headhunter242 · 2009-01-24 12:39:27

I had the same behaviour on my Thinkpad T60.
After more than one month finally I've just found a solution.
I have to remove the module ath_pci before rebooting. Don't know why but it really works!
So I've added this line to the /etc/rc.local.shutdown file

#!/bin/bash
#
# /etc/rc.local.shutdown: Local shutdown script.
#
rmmod ath_pci

Hope this one can help someone else!

Dario

leeyee · 2009-05-30 08:15:34

OMG, I have the same problem on thinkpad T400, I was thinking it's BIOS or hardware problem, now I'm totally sure it's related to Arch linux only, because other distros don't have this. I will try you guys gave as soon as I get back to laptop.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-12-24 09:59:15

System hangs only on reboot before bios

#2 2008-12-24 14:07:26

Re: System hangs only on reboot before bios

#3 2008-12-24 14:24:01

Re: System hangs only on reboot before bios

#4 2008-12-25 15:32:02

Re: System hangs only on reboot before bios

#5 2009-01-24 12:39:27

Re: System hangs only on reboot before bios

#6 2009-05-30 08:15:34

Re: System hangs only on reboot before bios

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