From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S266233AbUHHUGP (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Aug 2004 16:06:15 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S266245AbUHHUGP (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Aug 2004 16:06:15 -0400 Received: from anchor-post-36.mail.demon.net ([194.217.242.86]:48908 "EHLO anchor-post-37.mail.demon.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S266233AbUHHUGJ (ORCPT ); Sun, 8 Aug 2004 16:06:09 -0400 Message-ID: <411687B0.1070901@superbug.demon.co.uk> Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 21:06:08 +0100 From: James Courtier-Dutton User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7.3 (X11/20040805) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: kernel list Subject: /dev problems with boot: unable to open an initial console. X-Enigmail-Version: 0.84.1.0 X-Enigmail-Supports: pgp-inline, pgp-mime Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org I am using linux kernel 2.6.7 with udev. I thought that with this, I would never have to create any files in /dev again, because hotplug etc. would do the job for me. Just after booting the kernel image, it starts running the first process id 1 "init". If /dev is empty, init fails to complete and returns the error message: "unable to open an initial console." Once I manually created /dev/console, and /dev/tty0, linux booted up ok, and it reached a login prompt. To me, this seems like a bug in the linux kernel. I would have expected that when using udev, I would not have had to put anything in /dev Here is what gets mounted at boot time from /etc/mtab /dev/sdb5 on / type reiserfs (rw,noatime) none on /proc type proc (rw) none on /sys type sysfs (rw) none on /dev type ramfs (rw) none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw) /dev/sdb6 on /u type reiserfs (rw) none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw) none on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw) Maybe the problem is that not everything is getting mounted before "init" is started, or maybe hotplug is not given enough time to act before "init" is started. I can see this causing problems if one tries to boot from a hotplugable device like usb. Any comments? James