Reordering the boot for fun and profit [LWN.net]

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 17, 2008 22:35 UTC (Thu) by AJWM (guest, #15888)
In reply to: Reordering the boot for fun and profit by Thue
Parent article: Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Well, on _my_ system, runlevels go up to eleven.

More seriously, why does runlevel 4 exist?  Somebody must have used it for something
somewhere, but no distro that I can recall does.  X11 with no networking? (Would that even
work? I guess if X is configured not to use sockets for local access.)

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Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 0:33 UTC (Fri) by sholdowa (guest, #34811) [Link]

Level 4 was originally graphical without networking. However, that's pretty useless anyway,
and involved turning the networking from level 3 off, so nobody ever used it.

This is the only thing that I just can't understand why debian has to screw it up, and use
level 2 for everything, graphical or no.

As for the sequencing, it's not really rocket science - it's alphabetical! Originally the
numbering was such that the Kill script + Startup script = 100 ( or 1000 if you used HP-UX ).
That way, the services were stopped in the reverse order of startup, so there's no problem.

eg S80apache and K20apache, S81tomcat and K19tomcat

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 7:59 UTC (Fri) by midg3t (subscriber, #30998) [Link]

I think the Debian approach is to hide the archaic concept of runlevels and avoid this
0,6,1,2,3,4,5 confusion altogether.

There are facilities for shutting down, rebooting, booting in rescue mode, and [re]starting
the GUI. Joe User doesn't need to be introduced to this wacky concept of runlevels.

(But he does need to know which display manager is the right one.)

Reordering the boot for fun and profit

Posted Jan 18, 2008 20:59 UTC (Fri) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]

This is the only thing that I just can't understand why debian has to screw it up, and use level 2 for everything, graphical or no.

Because when this decided, many years ago, there was no consensus on what belonged in the various run-levels, nor what the default should be. To avoid ongoing flame wars, we decided to just make them all the same, and let the user adjust as desired. This actually works pretty well, since most users don't have any real use for anything between "single-user" and "everything". The growth of wireless and portables has, since then, made such distinctions more interesting, but even then the useful distinction is not "network/no-network" but "which network am I connected to", which runlevels don't directly solve.

Runlevel 4 mystery

Posted Jan 18, 2008 4:25 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

> More seriously, why does runlevel 4 exist? Somebody must have used it for something somewhere, but no distro that I can recall does.

Slackware uses runlevel 4 as the X11/GUI runlevel (equivalent to runlevel 5 in most other distros). Slackware's runlevel 5 is not used by default but is configured identically as runlevel 3.

Disclaimer: I'm a devout Slackware user (for more than three years, now). I actually use runlevel 5 as my default GUI run level by way of starting kdm via rc.local script.

And, no, I don't defensively ask others what they don't like about .tgz archives (even though I still think sbergman27's post is funny). Besides, we're all Linux enthusiasts, no matter which distro we prefer!