Shutting down and rebooting

You rarely need to reboot a Neutrino system. If a driver or other system process crashes, you can usually restart that one process.

Note: Don't simply turn off a running Neutrino system, because processes might not shut down properly, and any data that's in a filesystem's cache might not get written to the disk. For information about reducing this effect, see "Filesystems and block I/O (devb-*) drivers" in the Fine-Tuning Your System chapter.

To shut down or reboot the system in text mode, use the shutdown command. You can do this only if you're logged in as root. This utility has several options that let you:

name the node to shut down (default is the current node)
specify the type of shutdown (default is to reboot)
shut down quickly
list the actions taken while shutting down (i.e., be verbose)

Before the shutdown program shuts down the system, it sends a SIGTERM signal to any running processes, to give them the opportunity to terminate cleanly. For more information, see the Utilities Reference.