[ConsoleKit] extend ConsoleKit to support fast reboot on OpenSolaris x86

[David Zeuthen]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Lennart
Poettering<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
>> If 'fast reboot' is available, why would I even want slow (e.g.
>> 'normal reboot')?
>
> Because a hardware reset is still a hardware reset. Just rebooting the
> kernel does not reinitialize the hardware.

For that oddball case, you have the following options

 - use reboot(8) from the command-line and don't select 'fast'

 - shutdown the machine, power it back on (most serious enterprise
   setups have things like lights-out / remote power management)

In other words: I don't think it's something we should expose in the GNOME UI.

> BTW, we have this on Linux too, and had it for quite some time. There
> is "kexec" which allows a Linux kernel execute another Linux
> kernel. IIRC on Debian if you install a 'kexec' package the 'reboot'
> call is actually turned into a 'fast reboot'.
>
> Maybe this is something we want to support in CK for Linux, too? Would
> certainly be nice if after a pkgkit upgrade we could be a bit
> quicker in bringing the system back up.

Yup, but I think this is something Linux's reboot(8) command should
support natively. That is to say, I'm still not convinced we need any
ConsoleKit changes here. FWIW, I'd love to see this happen - I have a
box (with lots of SAS hardware) that takes 60-90 seconds until it gets
to the bootloader...

      David