If you've ever hacked on a Linux box, you know that there's a slight chance the system might freeze and become entirely unresponsive. In general, this is extremely rare with Linux but it does happen. When installing the HPPA port of Debian Linux onto my HP PA-RISC J6000 Workstation, the Debian installer completely froze (as described here in my post to the HPPA Debian community). BTW, I never got a response back from my attempt to alert the Debian folks of this issue.
Nevertheless, if you need to take control and gracefully restart a completely "frozen" Linux box, you'll be happy to know that there is hope. Hold down the ALT+SysRq key combination. While holding down ALT+SysRq, press R-E-I-S-U-B and watch your system reboot gracefully (e.g., no corrupted file systems). Here's what R-E-I-S-U-B does while you're holding down ALT+SysRq ...
Check out some of the other Linux ALT+SysRq helper functions here.
Enjoy.
Nevertheless, if you need to take control and gracefully restart a completely "frozen" Linux box, you'll be happy to know that there is hope. Hold down the ALT+SysRq key combination. While holding down ALT+SysRq, press R-E-I-S-U-B and watch your system reboot gracefully (e.g., no corrupted file systems). Here's what R-E-I-S-U-B does while you're holding down ALT+SysRq ...
- R: Switch the keyboard from raw mode to XLATE mode.
- E: Send the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init.
- I: Send the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init.
- S: Sync all mounted file systems (IMPORTANT).
- U: Remount all mounted file systems in read-only mode.
- B: Immediately reboot the system, without un-mounting partitions or syncing.
Check out some of the other Linux ALT+SysRq helper functions here.
Enjoy.
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