Tuesday 12 June 2012

Reboot on Dell Latitude E6520 with Arch linux

On Dell Latitude E6520 and some other Latitude models, a number of distributions were having issues with reboot. Rebooting by any method, viz.

  • restart command
  • shutdown -r now command
  • or restart from GUI

stopped all processes. The run level goes to 6 and everything works fine. Finally the system shows a message that it is rebooting now but the reboot does not happen. Ubuntu had this bug too but they fixed it and when my friend tried Ubuntu on the same hardware, reboot worked fine for him. I filed a bug in Arch and discussed it on #archlinux. The developers said it is an upstream issue and I was able to find an already reported bug upstream. Looking into the bugs and comments, I figured I should try setting the kernel parameter 'reboot' to 'pci'. So, I changed the kernel line in /boot/grub/menu.lst to include 'reboot' parameter as follows.

kernel /boot/vmlinuz26 root=/dev/sda2 resume=/dev/sda1 ro reboot=pci


After the above change, my system rebooted successfully.


N.B.: 1. Here, /dev/sda2 is my root partition and /dev/sda1 is my swap partition.
         2. Read more about rebooting a system.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've been having this problem with Fedora installed on my Dell Latitude D630 for a while and just chose to ignore it, but it has become really annoying. I'm so glad I came across your blog, works perfectly now. Thanks

Louis said...

Thank you for your blog, it has helped me to finally solve the reboot problem on my Dell Latitude E6520!

Just a note for those of you who are using Grub2... see here how to set the reboot=pci kernel parameter:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/19486/how-do-i-add-a-kernel-boot-parameter