This bug is related to a fresh gentoo system installed from a stage3 tarball. If one boots a newly installed gentoo system, the boot process hangs at the moment /sbin/init is called. No error message is printed. This happens because /dev is empty (more precisely, contains only /dev/null). /sbin/init wants some basic files like /dev/console boot. After populating /dev with base entries, system boots without problems. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot from a USB stick (gentoo livecd). 2. Follow gentoo handbook: prepare root partition, unpack stage3 tarball, install base programs like grub, prepare kernel, ...). 3. Reboot. Kernel initializes itself, "VFS: Mounted rootfs ... readonly" is printed. 4. Nothing happens from this moment: system does not boot, no error message is printed. "emerge -e system" does not help.
Probably obsolete by now - udev needs to be in sysinit runlevel, but IIRC that should already be fixed in recent stage3 tarballs.
udev _is_ in sysinit. I was installing the system yesterday, tarball from June, 9.
The udev issue is bug 369037. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 368597 ***
