getty inittab entries not honoured

[fromport]

I want my system to have only 1 getty running at the first vc.
Since standard runlevel is 2, i only enable the other getty's at runlevel 3:
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty1
2:3:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty2
3:3:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty3
4:3:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty4
5:3:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty5
6:3:respawn:/sbin/getty 38400 tty6

With the "old" init all i had to do was :
init q
killall -9 getty

Upstart for some reason doesn't recognise this.
Even when i put a "#" in front of the lines with the other
getty's upstart will still restart new ones after a kill.

After a reboot it worked.
So unless i'm misstaken, upstart is not truly compatible with the old init behaviour. If this is inteded, i'm sorry to have wasted anybody's time/effort.

Danny

[Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott)]

We migrate changes made to /etc/inittab on upgrade from dapper, from your bug report I assume that you have made these changes since installing edgy rather than before you upgraded?

upstart is not intended to actually parse the /etc/inittab file -- it's too free-form, and not really possible to do reliably. Modification of this by users is sufficiently rare, and those users sufficiently technically advanced, that we felt it would be better to document how to make these changes with upstart than try and honour them.

/usr/share/doc/upstart/README.Debian.gz contains the appropriate docs:

How do I change which runlevels gettys are run in?
--------------------------------------------------

In /etc/event.d there is a file named ttyN for each getty that will be
started, where N is numbered 1 to 6. Edit these files, there are a
series of lines of either "start on runlevel-N" or
"stop on runlevel-N".

Change "stop" to "start" or "start" to "stop" to match your taste.

This will not take immediate effect, however you can run "stop ttyN"
to stop one that is running or "start ttyN" to start one that isn't.