Introduction of soft-reboot

Intro

systemd v254 introduced a new reboot method: systemctl soft-reboot. A soft-reboot is similar to a regular reboot, except it affects user-space only. This command does:

• Shutdown of all running services and other units
• Optional: switch to a new root file-system
• Re-exec systemd
• Start all systemd services again

The advantage of this method is a pretty fast reboot:

• No hardware, firmware and bootloader
• No kernel
• No initrd

But there are some challenges to be solved:

• Kernel tables will not be flushed (may break services like firewalld+podman).
• No initrd means that everything that is normally done in the initrd is not executed. In the case of MicroOS, this will break mount of overlayfs for /etc with transactional-update or relabeling the system for a new SELinux policy.
• /run will not be cleared, which means reboot needed trigger will not be removed. This may affect many more services not expecting that files survive in /run.

Nevertheless, this method is ideal for quick reboots with transactional-update, e.g. if you only installed another package.

Current status

Support for soft-reboot is fully integrated in transactional-update and rebootmgr. The known, reproducible problems with soft-reboot are solved.

Currently soft-reboot is still disabled in transactional-update, but will be enabled by default in the near future.

How to use

• An admin can trigger an immediate soft-reboot with: systemctl soft-reboot
• A scheduled soft-reboot via rebootmgr can be triggered with: rebootmgrctl soft-reboot
• With transactional-update it is not possible to enforce a soft-reboot, if soft-reboot is enabled, tranactional-update reboot will choose the best fitting reboot method based on the list of package updates. See man zypp-boot-plugin for more details and how to configure this.

If a soft or a hard reboot was done can be checked with the last command. The entries s-reboot or soft-reboot indicates a soft-reboot was done, reboot means this was a normal reboot. The detection will only work reliable with systemd v256 or newer.

Installation and Configuration

A prerequisite for this feature is that the patterns-microos-base-zypper package is installed. This pattern may be missing on old installations that have only been updated regularly.

The zypper plugin zypp-boot-plugin analyses the list of packages which get installed or updated and defines, if a hard reboot is required or a soft-reboot is good enough. /usr/etc/zypp/zypp-boot-plugin.conf contains the default configuration, which can be overwritten with drop-ins in /etc/zypp/zypp-boot-plugin.conf.d/*.conf

The configuration file /usr/etc/tukit.conf defines the system default. The variable REBOOT_ALLOW_SOFT_REBOOT is either set to false, this means soft-reboot is by default disabled, or true, which means a hard reboot is always done if a reboot is requested.

How to enable

To enable soft-reboot support in transactional-update, create the directory /etc/tukit.conf.d/ and create a file:

echo "REBOOT_ALLOW_SOFT_REBOOT=true" > /etc/tukit.conf.d/soft-reboot.conf

How to disable

To disable soft-reboot support in transactional-update, create the directory /etc/tukit.conf.d/ and create a file:

echo "REBOOT_ALLOW_SOFT_REBOOT=false" > /etc/tukit.conf.d/soft-reboot.conf