Ubuntu 16.04 won't shutdown

Question

When I try to power off Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on my MSI GS60, the laptop will not shut down. Reboot works fine though. I have removed the quiet splash parameters for grub so I can see the output. When I try to power off the laptop, it gets to:

[ OK ] Reached target Shutdown
[ OK ] Reached target Final Step.
Starting Power-Off...
reboot: Power down

and it stays like that forever. I have tried the Sys Req key trick to make it poweroff and it doesn't work.

I have tried to set the following in /etc/default/grub and then run update-grub

• acpi=off --> won't even boot
• noapic --> will shut down, but keyboard doesn't work at all
• nolapic --> no difference
• apm=power_off --> no difference
• reboot=bios,force,efi,warm, etc... --> no difference
• irqpoll --> no difference
• acpi=force --> no difference
• xhci quirks on grub config didn't help either

This known bug is a similar issue, but unrelated since in this case the system reaches the "halt" status but doesn't shutdown.

Solution

I believe mine was a bit different because it was reaching the target [ OK ] Reached target Shutdown. I was forced to disable USB 3.0 in BIOS and now I can shut down normally.

Comments

[vagaerg]

The known issue is not exactly the same as my problem. In my case, the whole system is halted once it gets to "Reached target shutdown". The Sys Req + REISUB does absolutely nothing at that point, so I would say it has something to do with the way Linux interacts with the BIOS/EFI. However, and as strange as it sounds, I found out that using systemd to change the execution state to level 0 will properly shut down the laptop, whereas sudo shutdown / sudo halt -p / ... will not

[Bram]

Same problem here on an MSI WS60. Initially we needed acpi=off to boot the USB stick.

[vagaerg]

Mine was reaching it too ;) It is still random, it will sometimes shut down and sometimes it will do nothing. The USB thing is strange, there are a few compatibility fixes for USB 3.0, but they didn't do anything in my case, and disabling USB 3 is not really an option for me. Thanks for the suggestion though, can be useful for future reference!