> I'm quite sure that in original Berkeley Unix, as on the VAX 11/780, halt
> was an immediate halt of the CPU without any process cleanup or file system
> umounting or anything. Early SunOS (pre-Solaris) was like this, too.
>
The SunOS 4.1.2 man page for halt says
NAME
halt - stop the processor
SYNOPSIS
/usr/etc/halt [ -oqy ]
DESCRIPTION
halt writes out any information pending to the disks and then
stops the processor.
halt normally logs the system shutdown to the system log
daemon, syslogd(8), and places a shutdown record in the
login accounting file Ivar/admlwtmp.
These actions are inhibited if the -0 or -q options are present.
The BSD 4.3 (that ran on VAXen) man pages say largely similar things:
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=halt&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=4.3BSD+Reno&arch=default&format=html
Everything is somewhere on the net :-)
P.