Greetings,
I have confirmed that the shutdown (at least in my testing) is actually halting the system properly and the storage is being cleanly unmounted! I verified this with the system serial console.
Serial Console:
Please see the first post in this link:
I was able to get the serial console running for boot-up and shutdown. I was also able to get a three (3) pole plug to work; four pole plug is not necessary
( as long as the collar is taped ).
1)
tape the collar of the plug ( 2mm ) or use a four pole plug
( the plug is labeled wrong , well do you label the plug's pins , or do you label where the plug's pins go !?! )
( plug's pins: tip--Rx, ring--Tx, ring--gnd, collar taped ) if using three(3) pole plug !
2)
flip the slider switch inside the Pinebook (mainboard outside edge) towards the center of the board
3)
disable the systemd service which starts the pinebook-headphones service ! (important: see top link)
sudo systemctl disable pinebook-headphones
4)
attach the cabling & start your serial console monitor terminal software ( I used minicom )
5)
boot-up the Pinebook
Notes: I'm embarrassed to tell you that not including the time it took me to cut the slot in the bottom case (to have access to the slider switch) it took me four hours to make the cable and get the damned console running! This is insane. The serial console of an embedded system should just work. To recommend this to a noob who needs help fast would be immoral, or at least unethical.
Once you get the logon prompt on the serial console you may logon to the Pinebook with the serial terminal ; its fun, enjoy!
If you leave the serial console running , when you shutdown there will be shutdown messages on the console as services are quiesced and storage is unmounted ( these messages are very similar to boot-up messages but in reverse ).
If everything goes smoothly you should see a message at the end with a time-stamp and the words:
Sytem halted.
Anyways, it looks like there is a disconnect between the system and the ARISC|PMIC ( AXP803 Power Management Integrated Circuit ). The system does shutdown cleanly, but the PMIC fails to power-down; failure to notice this will leave the power on forever until the battery is flat-- chances are very good that after that the battery will not recover without a great deal of effort.
Please see this link:
Note: There are three ways to initiate the shutdown :
1) sudo halt ( from the serial console )
2) click System Shutdown --> shutdown dialogue ( then click shutdown )
3) press and hold the power button momentarily --> shutdown dialogue ( then clcik shutdown )
As it turns out, (3) option above is the most reliable for a full power-down because not only the OS gets told to shutdown, but the ARISC PMIC expects the shutdown to come along; so the full power-down actually occurs !
