Greg A. Woods writes:

>as well.  I still tend to not trust the automatic kernel unmounts, even
>though I've no technical reason for not trusting it, and so I often do
>"umount -a" myself when shutting down from single user mode.  I've even
>been known to "umount -u -o ro /" too.

Maybe some runlevel-style scheme would really be best then;
so that halt/reboot just send the appropriate signals to init
which then shuts down running the respective runlevel scripts.
I'm just not comfortable at all with halt or reboot (which I
normally use everywhere since I rarely have to inform users
via shutdown -- and shutdown is just a user-information wrapper,
read the manpage) when halt/reboot don't do the full show.
If certain userland stuff is required for proper shutdown, and
it really doesn't make sense doing it in the kernel (which is
not my opinion regarding swap) then halt/reboot ought to do that
aswell.  If you don't want it, type sync three times, make a
quick prayer and run halt -q or similar.

-- 
Matthias Buelow
home: mkb/at/mukappabeta.de
uni:  mkb/at/informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de