[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#515595: /sbin/runinit confused over runlevel

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

[Petter Reinholdtsen]
> I believe runlevel uses /var/run/*tmp, and guess its content is bogus.
> Any idea what could mess up the utmp/wtmp files?

It is calling setutent()/getutent() to find the runlevel information,
and this reads /var/run/utmp to get the current status.  No idea what
could mess up utmp.

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]
> Can't we fix it to ask init?  Resilience is good, and init is NEVER wrong
> about the runlevel...

I guess we could extend init/runlevel to track this information.
Would have to extend /dev/initctl protocol and make runlevel suid
root, I guess.  Do init know about the previous runlevel?  If not, it
would have to be extended to have this information.

Is it worth it to make runlevel suid root, to work around a strange
bug in something messing up /var/run/utmp?

Happy hacking,
- 
Petter Reinholdtsen