Mageia forum

I recently tried to restart a Mageia system using the time-honored REISUB method (aka Magic SysRq keys).

I discovered that both Alt-SysReq-E and Alt-SysReq-I don't do what I've come to expect them to over many years of Linux use, that is, send TERM and KILL signals, respectively.

Rather, they both seem to restart the DM (complete with auto-login, if it's turned on), which would seem exactly counter to what these commands are traditionally supposed to do (that is, stop processes, not spawn/respawn them).

Is this a configuration issue? Or is this an "improvement"?

as you can see here

http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sysrq.txt

'e' - Send a SIGTERM to all processes, except for init.
'i' - Send a SIGKILL to all processes, except for init.

both these command were killing all processes except init

however init has been substitued by systemd,
so this problem could be related systemd

reading here

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=752593

seems that Alt-SysReq-S e Alt-SysReq-B are working fine,
I can't find anything about Alt-SysReq-E and Alt-SysReq-I with systemd

Thanks for the reply, and for confirming my suspicions.

Damn shame.

Greetings to all!

I tested here exhaustively and all shortcuts work! But Alt-SysReq-I has a Bug.
Alt-SysReq-I : Send a SIGKILL to all processes in one task. Should I push until killing all tasks.
If you want to test, note how die desktops Ctrl +Alt + Fn, n of 1 up to 6.
In each desktop leave running top and see how processes die!

However, there really is a loop (bug) and the X is restarting every time I press I

See through top and report that noted...

I reported the bug because it is broken into Mageia 2 a safe method to restart a linux.

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6842

Everything is working perfect with REISUB method:

Colin Guthrie 2012-07-25 17:52:13 CEST
This is expected behaviour. The DM is meant to restart after the binary dies.
Just typing killall X (or perhaps the containing DM) would exhibit the same
behaviour - i.e. it is nothing to do with the sysreq keys.

If you don't like this behaviour simply copy the prefdm.service systemd unit to
/etc/systemd/system/, edit it accordingly to disable the restart and run
"systemctl enable --force prefdm.service"