udev, ttys, and other pseudo-devices

["Luke A. Kanies" <luke@madstop.com>]

Hi all,

I'm trying to get udev to work on Debian unstable, and although I've kind
of succeeded I still don't have a functional system.

I can now successfully boot and log in via SSH, but to do so I have to
manually create /dev/console (otherwise I get a kernel panic when init
runs), /dev/null (many things need this), and /dev/urandom (for ssh).
Well, I'm not manually creating them really; I've added them to
links.conf:

M console c 5 1
M null c 1 3
M urandom c 1 9

Actually, I had to mount the root filesystem while booted off CD and
create these devices in a real /dev because init starts udev, udev
normally creates /dev/console, and /dev/console is required by init, which
results in the above-mentioned kernel panic.  The only way I could find
around that was to have the /dev/console device exist on the root disk,
which seems like a hack and is probably going to hurt me eventually.

I'm still missing many important device files, though, the most important
being some kind of terminal device so I can run getty or fbgetty.  This is
what my /dev looks like right now:

[/dev]
luke@culain(0) $ ls /dev
MAKEDEV  cdroms    initctl  mapper  ptmx    scsi  shm    sr0   st0l
xconsole
agpgart  console   input    misc    pts     sg0   snd    st0   st0m
audio    hci_vhci  log      null    radeon  sg1   sound  st0a  urandom
[/dev]
luke@culain(0) $

No vcs devices, no tty devices.  In /etc/udev/rules.d I have compat.rules
and devfs.rules linked, and I've uncommented the TTY lines from
compat.rules.  Checking /var/log/daemon.log shows that udev is reading the
files, but it's only creating snd devices and nothing else.

I have sysfs mounted and can see tty devices in /sys.  DevFS is no longer
running.

Also, udev seems to be ignoring the udev.permissions files; I have
specific permissions marked for a few devices and they are not getting
those permissions.

I have not yet started on getting X to work, as I imagine that's even more
painful than getting getty to work, but I really do need those ttys or
something equivalent (I'm fine changing /etc/inittab to reflect different
devices).

I've read every post about udev and ttys about 10 times, but it just seems
to work for everyone else.  Any ideas on where I should look, what I can
check?  udevinfo -p does not list any terminal devices, so it doesn't know
about them at all, but when I log in via ssh the /dev/pts/[0-9]* devices
correctly get created.

Is there a standard, documented way of forcing those tty or vcs devices to
get created?  Is there a driver I'm missing?  A missing driver doesn't
seem to be the problem, as I've got stuff in /sys/class/tty (including
'console', which would imply I shouldn't have to create it manually).

Help?  Please?

Thanks,
Luke

-- 
It's very hard to predict things . . . Especially the future."
                -- Prof. Charles Kelemen, Swarthmore CS Dept.