Re: [Tails-dev] Shutdown stopped working in nightly experime…

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Shutdown stopped working in nightly experimental?
intrigeri wrote (29 Nov 2013 12:43:22 GMT) :
> winterfairy@??? wrote (27 Nov 2013 14:10:51 GMT) :
>> When it reboots even though I selected shutdown, it actually does not
>> reboot properly. It reboot early in the memory erasing procedure (possibly
>> in the beginning) and leaves the memory unerased.


> I'll try to reproduce this (but IIRC on the ThinkPenguin Royal, it did
> reboot cleanly). Worst case, this will be added to the known issues of
> the next release, but it would be great if this could be investigated
> further.


I can reproduce winterfairy's results on a ThinkPad X201 (both with
the shutdown applet and with the emergency shutdown). FWIW, both this
system and the ThinkPenguin Royal have Intel graphics. I can't
reproduce this issue in libvirt/qemu (qxl graphics). winterfairy, what
graphics driver is used by the system exposing this bug? Can anyone
try and reproduce this on bare metal with non-Intel graphics?

I've seen no indication that the kernel has finished loading and run
the initramfs' init. I haven't checked if the memory wipe did happen
or not. I fear we have to treat this as a serious regression.

>From the top of my head, some notes:


0. Check that the memory wipe actually did not happen.
https://tails.boum.org/contribute/release_process/test/erase_memory_on_shutdown/
1. It could be worth having another look at the initramfs-tools
changes between 0.114 and 0.115. I would start with an ISO built
from experimental, that downgrades this package to 0.114.
2. It could be worth trying with kexec-tools 2.0.4-1 from sid and with
2.0.3-1 from Wheezy.
3. Any changes to the kexec feature in the kernel that break it for
our usecase?
4. kexec-tools didn't change since 0.21 so it can't be it.

winterfairy, do you think you can take care of any of this in the next
few days (say, before next Tuesday)? If not, anyone else?

(We'll verify #0 while running our test suite against the RC on Sunday
anyway, but if we could have more information or even a fix earlier,
it would be even better.)

Cheers,
--
intrigeri
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