Strange behaviour under RedHat 7.1, Vanilla 2.4.5

["Joshua M. Schmidlkofer" <menion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Redhat 7.1, ext2 fs's
AMD k6-2, 230Meg, 20 gig HD
Vanilla 2.4.5 Kernel
Alsa, and Nvidia drivers
devfsd 1.3.11

For the first time since I started using devfs in the 2.2.x release 
kernels, I am experiencing problems that seem to be related to it.  I 
don't know if I have misconfig'd something, but out of about 10 
machines, one, my home machine is now having issues w/devfs.  After I 
boot, everything runs ok, and I login to a console term, it's ok.  As 
soon as the first PTY is used, everything goes to hell in a handbasket. 
 /dev stops responding, and any process seeking, opening, or closing 
any devices in /dev is immediatly hung.  Sometimes after hours the 
system will recover.  I have had reports of 'Unable to remove vc/xx - 
file not found', in my syslog, occasionally I will also see something 
related to 'pts/x'. [This error is not verbatim, I apologize, It is at 
home, and I have not been able to get a peice of mail out yet. *sigh* 
Plus the keyboard died on my FW [argh]].  

Also, IF the system comes back, then an 'ls' in the 'dev/pts' directory 
finds something like 'm0' - 'm255', or maybe 'b0' - 'b255'.   It has 
only comeback twice since this all started.

I have two kernels, one I believe DOES have the devpts filesystem 
option, the other does not.  However, in any case that does not seem to 
make a difference.

The only changes that I have recently made was adding some options to my 
devfsd.conf to change default ownership on alsa & oss-compatibility 
devices.  This is a precursor, if it would be usefull, i can post my 
.config, devfsd.conf, etc.  If I can get the system to remain stable for 
long enough, I will remove the rule, and see if it affects the system.

I have also noticed wierdness w/devfsd.   It does not always behave 
according to what I would expect, and sometimes I think that I must be 
using the rules incorrectly in the config file.  

I hope this is not too vague.


thanks,
 Joshua