Hi, I have MSI H81I motherboard, I’ve bought it used couple of months ago, and when using both Windows and Linux whenever I click reboot and shutdown, the OS itself will do it, but it will leave computer turned on on gray/black screen where I would have to hold power button for couple of seconds for it to turn off completely, same happens during installation of an operating system where it needs reboot I’d have to be there to do it manually otherwise when I return no progress will be made as It was just staying on the black screen.
And recently I decided to try Haiku because it seemed like interesting OS, So I made a partition for it and I’ve installed there, and Haiku works pretty well, obviously not yet ready for complete switch and full time use, but what amazed me with Haiku is that shutdown and reboot work properly and I don’t have that black or gray screen or any wait time, so I’m writing this post in order to try and figure out why this happens and how does Haiku work in hopes of finding a solution so that I can properly shutdown and reboot on other operating systems too.
We do nothing special, just call the ACPI method that asks the system to turn itself off. The most likely explanation is that some broken driver/firmware/hardware prevents the shutdown, but that hardware is missing a driver in Haiku and remains uninitialized, avoiding the bug.
Have you checked if your bios is up to date? On my own machine, updatin,g the bios fixed a lot of bugs, shortened the boot time by several seconds, and added a few options to the bios settings.
I have been fighting issues trying to make it shutdown on all hardware, which is more or less an impossible task. Early ACPI required shutdown to happen on the boot processor, while later on this requirement seems to have been removed.
Since Haiku had a bigger problem when forcing shutdown on the boot processor, and most modern computers are fine shutting down on any CPU, we do that. Since the other OS are more likely to try to adhere to older specs it may very well be that they do that and we don’t.
(We still have apps and kits that may fail to shutdown, and some more or less ancient ACPI hardware (EEPC’s) that still cause shutdown problems, but all of those will hopefully go away with time.)
