/dev problems with boot: unable to open an initial console.

James Courtier-Dutton
2004-08-08T20:06:15Z

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