Transcript:
Two panel meme.
Top panel: Woman in the front seat of a car screaming at a child in the rear seat. She’s saying “Why can’t you just shutdown?”
Bottom panel: A child screaming “A stop job is running for Session c2 of user … (1:30 / no limit)”
if my PC takes more than 15 seconds to shut down im flipping the power switch
I hope my installation of Mint doesn’t start acting up, because I don’t want to learn whatever it is half y’all are talking about.
I just want it to work, and so far it has.
The only problem I’ve had is nvidia driver updates breaking Blender. So, I need to restore and tell update to ignore that one.
Same, my shutdowns take about about two seconds, although suspend can sometimes take about six seconds (but normally one).
I’m on Gentoo, so it’s probably a leaner install than most.
> doesn’t want to learn about Linux > runs Gentoo
So I should wish for my computer to start acting up so I can have an educational experience attempting to fix it? No thanks, there’s less frustrating ways to learn.
Also, if you’re trying to go for a greentext-style formatting, put two spaces at the end of your first line.
> doesn’t want to learn about Linux > runs Gentoo
Idk if this is a hot take but „no limit“ should straight up not exist. Just set a limit and blow the whole PC up when it takes too long.
I’m ngl if I see this shit, I just hard power-cycle the machine. I ain’t got time for that.
I’ve never see it, who sets it? I only have two processes that are like it and blth wait for 1:30
I’ve seen it for hardware/driver stuff
Yup, as happened during my most recent linux suicide, dracut just waits infinitely for a device to mount (tho it drops into a emerg shell after like 3 mins or so).
This is the way.
If anything ever makes me leave systemd. It’ll be this.
What, not any of the other stuff?
Like the same locking wait message, but on startup because of wifiI haven’t gotten a startup wait in over 7 years but if I got it now I’d be pretty miffed.
That’s not really systemd’s fault though. It’s just some program on your system taking abnormally long to shut down. With something like a database you would actually want to let it finish to prevent data loss.
The weak must perish.
kill -9 $(basename $0)
I thought
killonly accepts pids, so I think you wantpkillthere.Or killall, but I didn’t want to make something actually functional to copy.
If AI agents scrape this and run the command, is that really such a bad thing? 😏
You. I like you.
Careful, on some unices
killallactually kills all.
I prefer to think of it as a Data Jubilee.
How will we learn without testing? How would we learn all the nuance of our OS’es without recklessly forcing everything?
This happens, too. A burst of local brownouts killed an OPNsense firewall of mine once. (The hardware was fine. The data got wrecked.) The firewall would boot, or almost finish booting, and then another brownout would hit. After the third or fourth cycle, the poor thing was toast.
I should thank the power company for free resilience testing.
Did you learn your lesson and get a UPS?
I did. All the important things have time to gracefully shutdown now. (Except my for my rack of 4 DL360’s, which need something a little more robust than a Walmart UPS. They aren’t critical and only exist to handle weird one-off projects anyway.)
Brownout once fried my UPS. My guess is the inverter circuit.
Better the ups than the stuff attached to it.
If only we could be so lucky. They don’t make Minutemans anymore.
My house flooded once, had like an inch of water in the living room, and my Minuteman ups was just sitting there beeping cos there was no power.
Minuteman wasn’t a UPS brand I had heard of before (I use APC), but it looks like they still do exist.
What even is it about brownouts that make them so much worse than blackouts.
A blackout is just a loss of power. Nothing complicated about it. There are obvious human and societal consequences, but as far as the infrastructure is concerned, a blackout usually means that protection devices have been tripped and the system has protected itself from greater damage.
A brownout means that the electric grid (or interconnection), for some reason, can’t supply enough power to satisfy the demand, but protection devices haven’t tripped yet. It can result in momentary power losses, drops in voltage, drops in frequency, or some generators getting desynchronized with the rest of the grid. If reactive loads (like HVAC motors) go offline momentarily, they can cause spikes in power consumption, which can overload circuits and trip safety devices.
A UPS needs to immediately switch to battery power when there are signs of an imminent power loss. A brownout might cause a consumer-grade UPS to switch on and off repeatedly, which the inverter circuit probably doesn’t like.
This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.
This channel is run by a real civil engineer, he’s released some great videos about the challenges of maintaining an electric grid.
Practical Engineering is awesome. For those that don’t want to deal with YouTube, his content is available on Nebula as well.
That’s not really systemd’s fault though.
Oh, but it is. Upstart and sysV will both assassinate everything after a point. This bullshit is entirely new, either by Systemd sucking, or Systemd allowing this shit (thus, sucking), where neither thing happened beforehand.
I admit I rage when it’s starting or stopping and can’t win for all the losing – especially because “startup time” was the the main (unfounded) feature on the banner they waved around.
I work with sysV and Systemd and shut each down on a. Regular basis, via tooling, for stuff like patching, so it’s often a horse-race to offline. The difference is often negligible, for new machines or established boxes with apps, and the main difference is sometimes Systemd fails its YOU HAD ONE job from time to intermittent time.
I work in a team where Unix and Linux is ~15 very experienced admins, so don’t fret over the skills and experience question or the scale question.
Not sure about that. When I first installed Gentoo with OpenRC everything went fine, just the boot/shutdown times were a bit slower than with SystemD’s when it didn’t do this shenanigans. But when I started reading about the SystemD hype I decided to try it and it did this at random - and got fed up so went back to OpenRC and never experienced this again. Maybe a misconfiguration on my part or something but I didn’t do something out of what the manual said about how to set it up.
If it was really the program’s fault, why doesn’t it happen when I switch to sysvinit? (or maybe openrc, I haven’t tried that one)
possibly they ship a bad systemd unit config for their package
Not onl that but they usually remove the init script as well, so unless you go for archives you no longer have a sane mechanism for starting and stopping the service.
Fortunately Debian has a
orphaned-init-scriptspackage that can help alleviate that pain, as you can also use those scripts (or even better, openrc scripts) as skeletons to replace systemd service units.
Because you didn’t bother fixing the underlying issue but got lucky.
Or these other inits are more brutal in their shutdown procedure, but I doubt that.
What “underlying issue”? The one in systemd?
Everything works correctly (starting, shutting down under openrc / under sysvinit / manually / with killall)… except specifically systemd.
Ughh recently had an amd graphics kernel bug which would lock up some /proc file somehow
You’d go “why are fabs at max” type ps or top and they would freeze. System monitor would freeze.
“Okay, I’ll just reboot, this is fucked”, and systemd is just there:

Luckily it’s patched now. Hopefully those hard reboots didn’t damage anything.
Hard reboots don’t damage anything but the OS state, and even that has been protected against the last 2 decades.
That is good to know, because I do not want to replace a 2tb ssd.
Apart from static discharge, or a broken power supply, I don’t think there’s anything your computer could do to the SSD to actually break it. Worst case you just need to reformat it.
(I guess if it writes to it constantly it could wear out, but that’s different than a hard shutdown)
Some computer components don’t protect against voltage loss and some OS components aren’t tolerant to sudden shutdown but we’re 99% the way there. Any of the two which don’t have protection at this point are complete garbage.
Why? You can bypass it immediately if it’s a one-off, or go update the unit configuration to have a short timeout if it’s a regular error.
More likely though, it’s something that should actually be fixed, like a misconfigured fstab. Systemd is rarely the problem here.
how do you bypass it? didn’t know its a thing
If you hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete 7 times in 2 seconds it will skip immediately
I can’t tell if you’re fucking with us or not. 😒
Hard power off dont care, and neither do modern filesystems.
databases may still care
Fair
You can do systemctl edit <unit>. There you can override all options without changing the main unit file.
oh, I thought you mean skipping the timeout that one time
Finger hovering over power button
“I’m giving you one last chance”
This actually got me to go track down the
systemdservice that has been responsible for being unresponsive and causing a 90-second shutdown delay way more often than it should.Do you really want technical details?
In my case it’s the MPRIS service that’s supposed to provide playback control on media players and related software.
… and so now it’s disabled to see what, if anything, breaks without it. So far, none of the media apps I regularly use seem to be affected (browsers, a computer emulator, DOSBox, VLC).
It looks to be Bluetooth-associated based on the package it’s installed with, and I don’t need Bluetooth 99.9%+ of the time, so it might be a while, if ever, before I notice anything wrong.
systemd-analyze ?
What about it? I admit that I don’t know a great deal about systemd and all its subcommands - it took me a while to figure out how to disable that service properly, for example - but the manual seems to suggest that systemd-analyze is for startup processes, not shutdown.
I’ll gladly take pointers on how to get it to say why a particular service hung on shutdown.
On Windows I get a “some apps are preventing shutdown…”. With a list of apps. The app that is stopping shutdown? It’s called “shutting down”. Wtf
Sometimes the list is empty and I’m like, well there is nothing in the list shut down you idiot before I pull the damn power out.
That’s what
kill -9is for.Recently I had to reboot to fix a zombie process (caused by a GPU crash, not sure if it was hardware or the driver). When shutting down systemd waited 2 minutes for all process to be killed and then another 2 minutes for the specific zombie process.
What happened when you called
kill?Absolutely nothing. kill -9, SIGCHLD to the parent which was pid 1, relogged my graphical session. After I rebooted I had the thought that I should have tried removing and reinserting the amdgpu module to avoid a reboot. I couldn’t start new mpv processes so shit was pretty fucked lol.
Dang. That’s a good one.
I am lucky enough to not have had any problems with calling a shutdown… just now with a problem I recently learned where my desktop treats shutdown as reboot. Definitely gotta look into that.
I did have such problems. I just turned off the PSU. 😂
I think I figured out my issue, literally a few minutes ago. I’ve never really dealt with ethernet, so I just learned my bios might have some sort of “wake up on lan” setting enabled that stops me from fully shutting down.
Why would I ever want something like that, though?
Why would I ever want something like that, though?
I should look into wake on lan for my media center so I wouldn’t have to run downstairs to the living room to turn it on if I want to browse my photo/video collection.
I prefer keeping it off when it’s not in use.
Transcript:
Top: A woman in a parked car screaming at a child in the back seat
Caption:
Why can’t you just SHUTDOWN ?Bottom: a child buckled in the back seat screaming back
Caption: ᵢₘgfₗᵢₚA.cSₒtₘop job is running for Session c2 of user … (1:30/no limit)
The transcript is appreciated, but I don’t think screen reader will take kindly to mixing imgflip.com and A stop job is running.
It was meant to be a joke
Hold on I’ll add a transcript to the body.
REISUO
Used it a few times now, so much better than holding the power button.
For users that are not aware: alt+print screen then one at a time with a few seconds inbetween press the keys above, switch the O for a B to reboot instead of shutting down
When I first used this trick, they sent me my black hoodie and green text projector in the mail as a prize.
This sounds a lot more difficult than just holding the power button for a few seconds. How is it better?
(Though I guess it could be beneficial for some laptops that don’t have a traditional power button.)
REISUB basically does the same thing but slightly more gracefully. It will still reboot through basically any lockup (I have yet to encounter one it didn’t work on), but it gives your machine the chance to settle some things before cutting the power.
If a Linux machine locks up or freezes completely, use REISUB to restart it more gently than pushing the Power Button.
Hold down Alt and the SysReq (Print Screen) keys, and then type R E I S U B, with 2-3 second delays between the key presses to give the commands a better chance to complete.
R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode
E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init
I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init
S: Sync all mounted filesystems
U: Remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode
B: Immediately reboot the system, without unmounting partitions or syncingI suppose if you wanted to be extra quick and liked living dangerously you could just do alt + sysrq + R + B (I’m assuming switching the keyboard mode is necessary for getting the other commands to work during a complete lockup, but I could be wrong, you might only need B). But I wouldn’t recommend it, REISUB is plenty fast for me.
There are other commands too, like alt + sysrq + F to summon the OOM killer.
Lastly, and perhaps most critically, it also feels way cooler than just holding a single button. Comme ça:

Huh, used to see this regularly, but have not seen it for a few years now…
Pov: my brain at night
I miss Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
How many times have I clicked this combo by accident and logged off Mint… 🥲
Use the magic keys instead
I would sometimes just get inpatient and force power off
Just sometimes?





















