Well, you might think so, and perhaps there is some avenue that I haven't explored.  I ended up in situations in which a given inittab just wouldn't do the trick and only a different inittab would. For example, what serial lines are started and how.  In the end, no amount of scripting seemed to help. Only a separate inittab. My vague memories of the issue (I solved this some time ago and am only now getting around to submitting the change), is that serial lines were a prominent pain.  Some systems would start them, others would just error over and over and over (the serial line didn't exist, for instance). A lot of experimenting with all of the different knobs (boot command options, inittab, scripts, etc) ended up with no real answer and only frustration. Each system and configuration had its own unique combination of requirements. A simple, to the point, change was to simply allow the specification of the inittab that you wish to be using. A second scenario is, say, for an environment in which you want no serial input, but want a debug option. A simple approach is a default inittab with no serial lines, and a debug version with serial lines and shells. Overall, inittab is a very simple, sane, usable solution. This patch very simply allows you a choice to provide some flexibility and builds upon the existing mechanism.  As you point out, there are many other choices. This was one, low-cost, incredibly simple to implement one that I happened to put together. thanks, -b <div>On 11/1/06, Jason Schoon <<a href="mailto:floydpink@gmail.com">floydpink@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> On 11/1/06, B Thomas <<a href="mailto:bjthomas3@gmail.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">bjthomas3@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Yeah... that was stupid.  Let's try again with a much smaller, much improved version. Thanks for pointing out the obvious silliness in the original patch. -b</blockquote></div> Is this really something that busybox init should be handling?  There is nothing saying you have to use the init out of busybox to start your system.  Init could simply be a shell script or C application that you write.  In that case, especially in a shell script, it would be trivial to look for a command line parameter specifying the inittab (or any other config file, there is no requirement that you have to use /etc/inittab either) to use for that boot. At the very least, I would think this should be a config item, and it should be wrapped in the existing inittab config item. </blockquote></div>