Re: What means that: FATAL: udev is already active on /dev/.

[Jim McCloskey <mcclosk@ucsc.edu>]

  |> FATAL: udev is already active on /dev/

I've been banging my head against this problem for a week and a half
now. I get the error message at boot time, but udev (as far as I can
tell) seems to work as it is supposed to.

For me, the error-message began appearing only after a hard shutdown
(caused by a power-failure).  I assumed at first that it was because
some temporary file had not been deleted, because it was not a clean
shutdown. But since then, I've been through many cycles of clean
shutdown followed by re-boot, but the message will not go away. I've
also purged and re-installed the udev package.

I've searched up and down the net, and on the hotplug-devel mailing
list, but no enlightenment so far ....

If you look at /etc/init.d/udev, it seems that this error-message
results from a simple check for the existence of the data-base file
.udev.tdb (which I think is re-created in the /dev/ directory at each
boot):

    if [ -e "$udev_root/.udev.tdb" ]; then
      echo "FATAL: udev is already active on $udev_root."
      exit 1

But even deleting this file has no effect on whether or not the error
message appears at next boot.

My own system has a fully-populated /dev/ directory and an empty
/.dev/ directory.

Where is any of this documented????

Jim