In the section on manually configuring a 2.6 kernel, the docs specifically show the "dev" fs disabled. While, technically, this is legal, it causes all sorts of problems and headaches. All the entries that would have been added automatically to /dev must then be added manually with mknod. Even though the kernel will warn about problems during boot-up, since menuconfig so emphatically labels this option OBSOLETE, and it's not all that clear just how important this option is, it's very tempted to leave it disabled. I think the documentation should be updated to at least show that option selected, as it is with 2.4 kernels. It might be nice to add a note that this is a very important option. As a side-note, I hope the relevant developers are working on ways to get around this issue when devfs goes away completely. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Build a 2.6.12 kernel (assume it's also an issue with 2.6,11?) with devfs disabled 2. Lots of things (e.g. terminals and the mouse) quit working in X. Actual Results: I dug through lots of documentation, then gentoo's forums, and realized that I needed a new kernel with devfs enabled. Expected Results: The problem's not the software, it's the documentation. Unless I'm possibly missing something that should get emerged with, say, xorg, that really doesn't need the devfs.
we use udev with 2.6 kernels, not devfs
