fastboot/async and initramfs: How am I supposed to know when devices are finished initializing?

["Thomas Bächler" <thomas@archlinux.org>]

Okay, I have this problem in 2.6.29 with the "fastboot" option and in 
today's linux-2.6.git.

In initramfs, we run the following commands:
     /sbin/udevd --daemon
     /sbin/udevadm trigger
     /sbin/udevadm settle
Among other things, this loads the ata_piix on my machine. On older 
kernels I could assume that after these commands, /dev/sda* existed and 
I could immediately access them (in my case, I run cryptsetup on 
/dev/sda6). But now, the devices don't exist here, but are only created 
a second or so later. As a result, the initramfs script has already 
bailed out as it couldn't find /dev/sda6 and assumed that the hard drive 
didn't exist.

So my question is, if udevadm settle doesn't wait for the devices 
anymore, how am I supposed to know when the devices have been created? 
If there is no way to know, I would consider this a regression, as it is 
no longer possible to cleanly write initramfs scripts.

Thanks for you replies
Thomas Bächler
Arch Linux Developer