udev for Gentoo

While installing a new kernel on my good old gentoo box, I disabled devfs to switch to udev. It turns out that /dev is completely empty on disk, and I guess it used to be configured to mount /dev as devfs on boot.

With udev, that mount happens in userspace from scripts, so init got sort of unhappy and complained that it couldn't open a console (no devices yet), and I couldn't see any of the boot process until udev was up and the console agettys started.

I had to boot the gentoo CD, mount my root partition, and create a few bootstrap devices, in particular, the console. /sbin/MAKEDEV console seemed to get all the tty's in place and all was well then. For good measure, I also created /dev/null, since it looked like something had tried to write to it anyway.

I have the 2.6.11.5 kernel running now, pretty painlessly. You can really feel the speed increase on a p5-200!