Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@britannica.bec.de> writes:

> Note that I don't care if we use boothowto or a global enum system_state
> (RUNNING, REBOOT, HALT, POWERDOWN, PANIC or so). But I think for the
> rare cases we do care about, using a side channel is in the spirit of
> KISS.

Side access to globals is a bit icky, but I see the simplicity argument.
Using a function to return the value of interest, or at least a variable
that is just for this purpose seems nicer than inspecting a variable
that has multiple other purposes.