Comment 1 for bug 1463299

Hi Alex,

It is certainly possible to hit a race in upstart when changing runlevels. The /etc/init/rc.conf job is 'start on runlevel [...]' and has no 'instance' specifier. If the rc job is still running at the time that another runlevel event is emitted, then /etc/init.d/rc will not be called for the new runlevel.

In general this isn't a major issue because /etc/init.d/rc does very little on an (Ubuntu) upstart system and exits quickly. So it's very rare that a user will be trying to change runlevel before the previous runlevel switch has completed. Indeed, this bug has existed since the beginning of upstart's use and I don't believe anyone has reported it as a problem previously.

It's possible your reboot-test script should be changed so that wait_for_boot ensures the system has entered runlevel 2 before rebooting. I'm surprised if it takes longer for /etc/init.d/rc to finish than it takes for the user session to become available. Races here are also possible, however /etc/init.d/rc *should* be very quick on the phone also. If it's not - perhaps because an init script is blocking - that is something that we will want to debug.