Changes/Shorter Shutdown Timer

Shorter Shutdown Timer

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

A downstream configuration change to reduce the systemd unit timeout from 2 minutes to 15 seconds.

Owner

• Name: catanzaro
• Email: mcatanzaro at redhat dot com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 38
• Last updated: 2022-12-21
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

Currently, services which have stalled or are misbehaving can prevent shutdown for up to 2 minutes. This causes extreme frustrating for our users - someone goes to shutdown or reboot and then unexpectedly has to wait a long time before they can do anything else.

The most common service to cause this issue is PackageKit, but there are others.

The Workstation Working Group has been attempting to eliminate this bug for a number of years. Investigations have revealed that it's not possible to find and fix every misbehaving service: in some cases the misbehaviour comes from design flaws that cannot be reasonably fixed.

An attempt has also been made to have the unit timeout changed in upstream systemd. That attempt did not go anywhere, despite various efforts to move it along.

Feedback

The Workstation Working Group has a ticket where they have been tracking and discussing this issue. This change was also previously proposed to FESCo, where there was some discussion.

Benefit to Fedora

The primary benefit of the change will be to eliminate a very annoying and - frankly - embarrassing bug. Our users shouldn't have to randomly sit waiting for their machine to shutdown.

It will also encourage the correct use of shutdown inhibit APIs by services.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Merge the downstream systemd PR to reduce the unit timout
• Other developers:

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Objectives:

How To Test

Given the intermittent and unpredictable nature of the bug that is being targeted, the best way to test is by using the upcoming Fedora release. Are shutdown delays eliminated as intended? Do system services experience issues as a result of the change?

User Experience

This change will make the Fedora user experience less annoying.

Dependencies

No specific changes are required in other packages. However, service developers may want to take this opportunity to examine the shutdown behavior of their components.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: the change owners will revert the change in systemd.
• Contingency deadline: if we back out the change it would be best to do it before beta freeze.
• Blocks release? No.

Documentation

Documentation isn't required for this minor configuration change. Services that legitimately need to prevent system shutdown should use systemd inhibit. Desktop applications can use the XDG inhibit portal.