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

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 09.09.09 10:36, David Zeuthen (zeuthen at gmail.com) wrote:

> 
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Lennart
> Poettering<lennart at poettering.net> wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > Yes, exposing this in the GNOME UI seems like a really bad idea to me.
> >
> > Exposing this in some way in CK however makes sense to me. That way
> > pkgkit could select the fast reboot while the usual shutdown dialog
> > selects slow.
> 
> Why would some user of CK (e.g. a program) ever want select the slow
> method?
> 
> I think the point I was trying to make is that you only want 'slow' if
> you are trying to debug some oddball problem. Or if your hardware
> broken (in which case you edit a configuration file that reboot(8)
> will read so it always select 'slow').

I see it like this: if the user tries to reboot, then probably because
something is really wrong. If computers and their software were
without bugs there would not be a reason to manually reboot
ever. Which is the reason why I think that manually triggered reboot
shuld always be the 'hardest' reset avaiable.

OTOH there are automatically triggered reboots, most importantly after
a software upgrade. In this case rebooting is not really a choice
of the user but was asked for by the guy who designed the package that
was upgraded. Because fast boots are actually much much faster than hard
resets in this case the user's work should be disrupted only
minimally, hence a fast reboot is advisable.

Summary: fast reboots are just nicer to the user, so use them wen it
is safe to use them. Otherwise use full resets.

(But then again, I think the whole discussion is not too useful at
all, since rebooting In my opinion should be handled only be upstart,
and CK should be out of the game)

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering                        Red Hat, Inc.
lennart [at] poettering [dot] net
http://0pointer.net/lennart/           GnuPG 0x1A015CC4