SysRq-b is a hard shutdown. "Soft" vs "Hard" isn't a realistic distinction, systemd already does a "hard" shutdown if the timeout is exceeded. There is no reaso

SysRq-b is a hard shutdown. "Soft" vs "Hard" isn't a realistic distinction, systemd already does a "hard" shutdown if the timeout is exceeded. There is no reason to do a hard one in any system, a soft shutdown is always preferable as things like database engines might need a moment to save their data. If you send them a SIGKILL then your database engine will loose data.