Fubaredness Is Contagious

It appears that Amazon EC2 instances always boot to runlevel 4, no matter what runlevel you set as default in your /etc/inittab. I found a very old reference to this fact in forums (see here), which explains *how* it happens (XEN does it) but doesn’t explain *why*. And yes, by passing “4″ as last argument to kernel “command line” (as you can see here) they can do it. I am just wondering why…