Comment 22 for bug 251242

I've just been bitten by this interesting feature on a current Jaunty system.

I installed linux-crashdump, and now all my alterations to /boot/grub/menu.lst are ignored.
I spent ages trying to discover why /proc/cmdline was an old version that didn't exist any more in my menu.lst
[I didn't see that the system wasn't going via grub, because this is a remote server.]

May I recommend:

 (1) If linux boots via a kexec, please, please put something in dmesg (or /var/log/messages) to that effect.

 (2) /etc/rc6.d/S85kexec should do a kexec reboot of the default kernel and kernel-commandline by parsing
     /boot/grub/menu.lst. In many cases, this will be equivalent to "reboot the current kernel, with the current
     cmdline", but if the user has edited menu.lst, then that is what the user wants to get. In other words:
        * parse menu.lst [or possibly lilo.conf?] , to pull out the user's current preference for default kernel and cmdline
        * if they are the same as we're currently running, do a kexec -e
        * otherwise, use kexec -l... and/or kexec --command-line=... before the kexec -e.

  (3) I know about /etc/default/kexec, but it's simply not right to have a different configuration in two places.

I expect the system to come up in _exactly_ the same state, whether I started it with "shutdown -r now"
or "shutdown -h now" followed by pressing the power button. At the moment, wildly different things happen!

(I do really like the increased reboot speed though :-) ).