Re: starting with an empty /dev

[Mike Frysinger <vapier@gentoo.org>]

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On Friday 13 February 2004 05:24 am, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> IIRC initramfs already contains these devices, but anyway it's important
> to remember that if they are removed everything will break.
> Should we start thinking about how udev could be used in the real world?

the devices that are needed are somewhat distro (well, init scripts) 
dependent ...

> Maybe you dont care but I have installed udev and it is working for me
> great. But there were some problems.

using /udev never even occurred to me ... i've been using udev on my /dev 
since 002 :x

> I have found that devices:
> /dev/null,
> /dev/console

like i said above, this is specific to your init scripts ...
/dev/console is needed if you want to see output from your init scripts ... 
you can boot *just fine* without it ... just wait a while into the getty's 
pop up :)
/dev/null is needed by your _init scripts_ ... many boot up scripts just pump 
their output into /dev/null and then when there are errors, they output happy 
little errors for the user to understand ... if, before you've loaded up 
udev, you try to pump into /dev/null and your / is ro, the init scripts are 
going to think the command it just tried to run failed and so in general, 
everything dies

i've already created a small patch for inclusion with the Gentoo baselayout to 
handle the case when /dev/null doesnt exist (yeah, i like to `rm -rf /dev/* ; 
sync ; reboot -nf` for fun ... no seriously, i do) that way if you dont have 
anything in /dev/, your machine will boot up and you can login to create 
whatever nodes you may need in order to have a 'normal' bootup (which is kind 
of where you're at matt, /dev/console and /dev/null)
-mike

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