How do I close the DE cleanly whilst rebooting into the motherboard firmware's GUI (with SystemD)?

rokejulianlockhart · March 20, 2025, 10:18pm

Context

When necessary to programmatically reboot, I’ve been utilising qdbus org.kde.Shutdown /Shutdown org.kde.Shutdown.logoutAndReboot, ^[1] in the stead of systemctl reboot, because SystemCtl appears to merely send a SIGKILL to plasma, whereas logoutAndReboot appears to send a SIGTERM.

Question

However, how can I reboot into my UEFI’s GUI, without utilising systemctl reboot --firmware-setup? I ask because I’d like to always close plasma as it expects.

rokejulianlockhart · March 20, 2025, 10:20pm

There is kcm_smserver:

I’ll tentatively mark this as the solution for now. However, whether it’s scriptable isn’t evident, since systemsettings kcm_smserver --args merely returns:

systemsettings: Missing value after ‘--args’.

luisbocanegra · March 20, 2025, 10:46pm

ksmserver sets org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.SetRebootToFirmwareSetup to true

github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop

kcms/ksmserver/kcmsmserver.cpp

230d4af4f


      
          
          void SMServerConfig::setRestartInSetupScreen(bool restartInSetupScreen)
          {
              if (m_restartInSetupScreen == restartInSetupScreen) {
                  return;
              }
          
              QDBusMessage message = QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(m_login1Manager->service(),
                                                                    m_login1Manager->path(),
                                                                    m_login1Manager->interface(),
                                                                    QStringLiteral("SetRebootToFirmwareSetup"));
          
              message.setArguments({restartInSetupScreen});
              // This cannot be set through a generated DBus interface, so we have to create the message ourself.
              message.setInteractiveAuthorizationAllowed(true);
          
              QDBusPendingReply<void> call = m_login1Manager->connection().asyncCall(message);
              QDBusPendingCallWatcher *callWatcher = new QDBusPendingCallWatcher(call, this);
              connect(callWatcher, &QDBusPendingCallWatcher::finished, this, [this, restartInSetupScreen](QDBusPendingCallWatcher *watcher) {
                  QDBusPendingReply<void> reply = *watcher;
                  watcher->deleteLater();

So it looks like running

sudo qdbus --system org.freedesktop.login1 /org/freedesktop/login1 org.freedesktop.login1.Manager.SetRebootToFirmwareSetup true

Then

qdbus org.kde.Shutdown /Shutdown org.kde.Shutdown.logoutAndReboot

Should do the same?

Edit: Tried it just now and indeed it does

rokejulianlockhart · March 20, 2025, 11:06pm

@luisbocanegra, thank you! I should really learn to read the source code when I have a question like this. I’ve reposted this at superuser.com/a/1887619 for visibility, since the other answers there all mention systemctl: