udev: what's up with old /dev ?

J.A. Magallon
2004-10-10T22:08:53Z

Hi all...

I have just remembered that udev mounts /dev as a tmpfs filesystem, _on top_
of the old /dev directory. I have just booted to single user mode,
and checked that the old /dev is wasting around 13000 files (inodes) in my
box. Space is not an issue, that is around 480 Kb.

A couple questions:

- Is it possible to boot with an empty /dev, until udev builds it ?
- If this is not the case, which are the minimal nodes that should be
present ?
- For any answer to previous question, shouldn't the distro set up minimal
/dev (empty or with a few nodes) and _delete_ the old /dev tree ?

I don't remember exactly, but there are scripts at initscripts run before
udev. As I understand it, udev should be the very first thing to run, as
anything after it will probably need a /dev/something....

Why my simple logic does not work ?

(As I CC both cooker and LKML, this is a cooker specific question: could anybody
who has installed 10.1 from scratch, ie not an update, boot to runlevel 1 and
list his /dev)

TIA

--
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()able!es> \ Software is like sex:
werewolf!able!es \ It's better when it's free
Mandrakelinux release 10.1 (Community) for i586
Linux 2.6.9-rc3-mm3 (gcc 3.4.1 (Mandrakelinux 10.1 3.4.1-4mdk)) #2