Bug 480912 – Install creates /dev/null as regular file

• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 408947
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description dimonic 2013-08-13 20:04:15 UTC]

After installing stage3 and rebooting, I found I could not start sshd from init.d. After some debugging and googling, I discovered that this problem was caused by the /dev/null device being a regular file instead of the character device it should be.

I replaced it with the appropriate device:

# rm /dev/null
# mknod /dev/null c 1 3

and sshd would now start properly/

[Comment 1 Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2013-08-14 14:04:40 UTC]

Is udevd running? I suppose that should take care of the default device nodes.

[Comment 2 dimonic 2013-08-14 14:30:11 UTC]

I spotted this bug while trying to get udevd running - so the short answer is no. However, the /dev/null file remains a bug.

The inability to get udevd running results from an error in the main install documentation - which has one running make menuconfig, then genkernel - except the way it is documented, one is never using the config file one has just configured, so I could never get DEVTMPFS switched on in my running kernel (until I figured out how to specify a config file properly).

[Comment 3 Jeroen Roovers (RETIRED) 2013-08-16 14:02:14 UTC]

Oh, so CONFIG_DEVTMPFS CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT are missing?

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 408947 ***