On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Keith Harbaugh wrote: > Can any kernel gurus out there explain why the final message the kernel > gives upon system shutdown changed from > System halted > in Linux 2.0 to > Power down > in Linux 2.2?
I'm going to bet this was done to allow the kernel to automatically shut off the power on systems that have support for software power control. If you look at the code, you can see that the kernel isn't actually making this decision, it's the halt command that is doing it (by setting the value of the "flag" argument to the reboot() system call). I suppose it was determined that a shutdown command should power off the system if possible. If you don't like that, get the source for halt and change it :}
