Bruce Perens: > I think if your system hangs in shutdown it is hanging in "unmount". Often > this is an unmount of a partition on a non-responding NFS host. Unmount > should time out, I guess.
I too noticed this problem with 0.93R6 (sysvinit-2.57b-1) - if I hold down ctrl-alt-del for too long (or press it quickly several times), it will hang after the "sending TERM signal" message. This has nothing to do with NFS - this happens on my non-networked home box. If I press ctrl-alt-del only once and for very short time, it never hangs. Sounds like a bug in init - maybe some problem with the SIGINT handler if it gets called twice in a row, or something like this. umount in util-linux (2.4 and 2.5) has a misfeature: the NFS umount RPC call does time out, but if it fails, the filesystem is not unmounted. This means it is not possible to umount a NFS filesystem if the server is not responding. Older versions of umount don't have this problem, because they don't send any RPC calls. The right thing to do, I think, is to send the RPC call (maybe with an option to turn it off) and ignore any errors (unmount it anyway). I sent a bug report (with patch) to the current util-linux maintainer long time ago, but received no reply. Marek

