Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arwed von Merkatz <v.merkatz AT gmx.net>]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 12:37:25AM -0500, Jeremy Kolb wrote:
> Since udev runs in user space if something catastrophic happened,
> doesn't that make it more vulnerable? I'm not sure I can think of a
> scenario since I don't really know how it works, but for some reason I
> am picturing something horrible happening and getting a working kernel
> up but having an empty /dev directory.
> 
> Jeremy
 
If e.g. your udev binary breaks, you'll end up with an empty /dev
directory right now. Thanks for raising this point, i'll change the init
script so it checks whether the udev binary exists and is executable
before mounting a ramfs on /dev. Even with that precaution it could
happen that udev fails to create devices in some catastrophic
circumstances, then you would end up with an empty /dev. In that case
you could always boot with init=/bin/bash and have a normal static /dev
(the init.d spell creates this for people who don't have it, and newer
isos will install it too), so it's always possible to repair.

-- 
Arwed v. Merkatz                               Sourcemage GNU/Linux developer
                                                    http://www.sourcemage.org