[gentoo-user] Re: No /dev entries in recent stage3 snapshots?

[Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com>]

On 2009-01-25, Grant Edwards <grante@visi.com> wrote:
> On 2009-01-24, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 05:55:10 +0100, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
>>
>>> I have a server running that hets that null/console missing
>>> message every boot - and it does not hurt it at any way.
>>
>> A missing /dev/console stops the boot process here. It boots
>> without /dev/null, but only after udev spews out a load of
>> messages.
>
> Ah, not to worry: I've been assured in the gentoo forum thread
> that the problems we see when the root filesystem doesn't have
> proper /dev/null and /dev/console nodes aren't really
> happening:
>
>   Neither /dev/null nor /dev/console are needed at boot-time,
>   therefore their absence doesn't cause problems.

For posterity's sake, one of the problems that wasn't happening
was that my root partition always had to be recovered at
startup -- it apparently wasn't getting properly unmounted
during shutdown.  After re-creating the root partition's /dev
tree, that was cured.

This leads one to suspect that the block device node for the
root partition (/dev/hda3 in my case) is also required along
with /dev/null and /dev/console for proper start-up and
shut-down.

-- 
Grant