Purging devfs
When devfs first came out, it was cool and neat, and I liked the idea of not
having to wade through 1000+ entries in /dev so much that I jumped on the
bandwagon. Then udev came around and devfs bashing became the popular thing to
do. Eventually I was convinced of the technical merits of udev, and so
converted to udev.
Or so I thought. It turns out I had never quite done that on my desktop,
although I had deluded myself into thinking that I had. So when kernel 2.6.13
came around and ripped devfs out from underneath my feet, I fell flat on my
back. It turns out I had not only been running devfs all along up through
2.6.12, but somewhere along the line I had lost the real, static /dev. The
error I was getting was something along the lines of "Unable to open initial
console."
After some head scratching, googling, and false starts, it turns out the best
thing to do was to boot a rescue disk, mount the root partition, and copy over
/dev. (I did rsync -a /dev/ /mnt/tmp/dev).
One of my false starts was MAKEDEV std hda hdb hdc hdd. In retrospect this
should have worked, but my delusion was so complete that I thought udevd was
being started at boot when indeed it was not, and only those devices were not
quite enough to get me booted. At that point I lost interest in just how
minimal a set of devices I needed, and copied them all over.