Open Stack

It has been brought to my attention that Ironic uses the biggest hammer
in the IPMI toolbox to control chassis power:

https://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic/tree/ironic/drivers/modules/ipminative.py#n142

Which is

    ret = ipmicmd.set_power('off', wait)

This is the most abrupt form, where the system power should be flipped
off at a hardware level. The "short press" on the power button would be
'shutdown' instead of 'off'.

I also understand that this has been brought up before, and that the
answer given was "SSH in and shut it down yourself." I can respect that
position, but I have run into a bit of a pickle using it. Observe:

- ssh box.ip "poweroff"
- poll ironic until power state is off.
  - This is a race. Ironic is asserting the power. As soon as it sees
    that the power is off, it will turn it back on.

- ssh box.ip "halt"
  - NO way to know that this has worked. Once SSH is off and the network
    stack is gone, I cannot actually verify that the disks were
    unmounted properly, which is the primary area of concern that I
    have.

This is particulary important if I'm issuing a rebuild + preserve
ephemeral, as it is likely I will have lots of I/O going on, and I want
to make sure that it is all quiesced before I reboot to replace the
software and reboot.

Perhaps I missed something. If so, please do educate me on how I can
achieve this without hacking around it. Currently my workaround is to
manually unmount the state partition, which is something system shutdown
is supposed to do and may become problematic if system processes are
holding it open.

It seems to me that Ironic should at least try to use the graceful
shutdown. There can be a timeout, but it would need to be something a user
can disable so if graceful never works we never just dump the power on the
box. Even a journaled filesystem will take quite a bit to do a full fsck.

The inability to gracefully shutdown in a reasonable amount of time
is an error state really, and I need to go to the box and inspect it,
which is precisely the reason we have ERROR states.

Thanks for your time. :)