On 2/23/26 5:42 PM, Dave Close wrote:
I wrote:
On most of my machines, "reboot" entered as root causes the machine to
shutdown and then reboot, as I expect it should. But on one machine,
the machine does not restart. In the process of trying to understand
why this might be, I discovered that reboot is not an actual command:
# pwd
/root
# which reboot
/usr/sbin/reboot
# ls -l /usr/sbin/reboot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2025-07-10 20:42 /usr/sbin/reboot -> ../bin/reboot
# ls -l /bin/reboot
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 2026-02-06 16:00 /bin/reboot -> ../bin/systemctl
# ls -l /bin/systemctl
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 322584 2026-02-06 16:00 /bin/systemctl
This seems to say that entering "reboot" invokes "systemctl"
with no arguments. But the man page for systemctl implies that a
COMMAND argument is required and gives no hint what happens if none
is given. In fact, running "systemctl" with no arguments from the
command line acts like I had entered "systemctl list-units".
BTW, "shutdown" also traces to "systemctl". But on the misbehaving
machine, "shutdown -r" actually works as expected.
So how is it that entering "reboot" results in a reboot, at least on
most of my machines? And how can I discover why it leaves the machine
powered down on one of them?
Samuel Sieb answered:
When systemctl runs, it checks what name it was called as and changes
its behaviour according to that. When you boot the system, remove "rhgb
quiet" from the kernel command line. Then you can see what's happening
when it tries to reboot. As mentioned in the other email, it's likely a
system quirk or BIOS (EC) issue. Make sure you have the latest firmware
for your motherboard.
Thanks for the reply. Is that behavior of systemctl documented
somewhere? I certainly didn't see that in the man page.
I don't see why that would need to be specifically documented, but
there's sort of a note in "man reboot".
I do not have "rhgb quiet" on any of my machines. I like to see what
they do. But that doesn't help in general for this situation. The
problem happens when I run, "ssh machine sudo reboot". In general,
most of my machines don't have a console attached. Digging through
messages and dmesg, I don't see anything obviously wrong.
It won't be in any logs. Any messages would happen after everything is
stopped, so you'll have to see it on the console.
--
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