I installed with the livecd and started with stage1. I followed the steps from your website installation guide closely and it is nowhere mentioned that devs support is required for the kernel. When I first booted my sefl compiled kernel I got an errormessage telling me that devfs is missing and I should recompile my kernel to include it. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-x86-install.xml look at code listing 16.6
And Code Listing 6 at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook.xml?part=1&chap=7