problem with devfs

[Ben Munat <bent@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

While installing Gentoo I accidentally compiled my kernel without devfs 
support. As Gentoo's rc script is kind enough to rub my face in that 
fact everytime I boot, I decided to recompile with devfs support and 
devfs mount at boot enabled.

Unfortunately, I can't boot the resulting kernel: the rc script starts 
throwing "/dev/null: Permission denied" errors and then can't mount the 
filesystems. After debugging the rc script, I've found that /dev/null 
exists before the mount devfs command, but does not exist afterwards. If 
I take the mount devfs command out of the script, the kernel will boot, 
but devfs is not mounted (that seems obvious, but I wanted to make sure 
that it wasn't getting twice).

If I log into the maintenance console after the aborted boot, there is 
indeed a devfs line in /proc/filesystems and a .devfsd in /dev (in fact, 
that's *all* there is in /dev other than . .. and initctl).

If anyone has any idea why mounting devfs results in an empty /dev 
directory, I'd really love to hear it. Been struggling with this for 
ages and I'm running out of ideas!

Thanks,

Ben