On Tuesday, July 12, 2011 08:44:00 AM Keith Roberts wrote: > How can Linux _not_ have run levels. I thought that was a > central part of the design of Linux? No, it's a central part of the design of the old System V Init. C6, SL6, and upstream EL6 use upstart instead of SysVInit. EL7, if the direction of Fedora is any indication, won't have classic runlevels, but will use systemd. The Linux kernel knows nothing of runlevels; runlevels are userspace and have been since SysVInit was first used (and even before). All the kernel cares about is that it hands execution off to a userspace process that then takes care of further boot. That process can be /bin/sh or anything else, the kernel doesn't care.