On Sun, Jan 06, 2013 at 05:53:30PM -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > I have cleaned up the mess that is the reboot path once a bunch of years > ago, and apparently it is deteriorating again. Unfortunately, that's what happens when lots of cooks get their fingers in a pie with no coordination. This is why having maintainers is soo important for code - a good maintainer ensures that the code remains high quality by whatever means. Code without maintainers is subject to modification in all kinds of random ways, including duplicating code amongst architectures which should be generic code - that happens because no one wants to understand what other architectures require. Your original cleanups, afaik, are still all intact. The problem is that since then, kexec has come along, and invented a new callback (machine_shutdown) which gets called while the system is still live in full SMP mode (and presumably all the devices are still running and potentially scribbling over memory with their DMA.) Meanwhile kexec wants to pass control to the new kernel... that doesn't sound particularly clever to me.
