Re: [gentoo-user] udev-191 bit me. Insufficient ptys

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:35:06 -0500
Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:

> So, I botched the upgrade to udev-191. I thought I'd followed the
> steps, but I apparently only covered them for one machine, not both.
> 
> The news item instructions specified that I had to remove
> udev-postmount from my runlevels. I didn't have udev-postmount in my
> runlevels, so I didn't remove it. Turns out, that dictum also applies
> to udev-mount. So after removing that[1], I was able to at least boot
> again.
> 
> Udev also complained about DEVTMPFS not being enabled in the
> kernel.[2]  I couldn't get into X, but I could log in via getty and a
> plain old vt, so I enabled it, rebuilt the kernel, installed it and
> rebooted...and now that's presumably covered.
> 
> I'm now able to get into X, but when I try to run an xterm, it fails.
> Checking ~/.xsession_errors, I find:
> 
> xterm: Error 32, error 2: No such file or directory
> Reason: get_pty: not enough ptys
> 
> I find this bizarre, as I'd never had any trouble with xterm in this
> way before. What'd I do wrong, and how do I recover? I don't trust
> emerging at this point; I tried re-emerging udev, and I aborted after
> I saw an stderr line about failing to open a pty, even though portage
> does quiet builds for parallel building by default...so I doubt
> whatever emitted that line on stderr was being properly guarded
> against the failure.
> 
> [1] I didn't have a boot cd or similar to work with, so I used the old
> init=/bin/sh trick on the command line. That was functional. And then
> I tried init=/usr/bin/vim, and things got real. :)
> 
> [2] Sparking a bemused discussion with a friend at tonight's LUG
> meeting over the devfs->udev->udev+devtmpfs progression, but that's a
> different story.

I can't get any kernel >=gentoo-sources-3.7.1 to work properly with
vtys either.

3.7.1 is fine, anything earlier is fine.
I haven't bothered tracking it down further than that (have a severe
dose of laziness right now...)

What kernel are you running on these affected hosts?

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com