• Eric W. Biederman's avatar
    init: Open /dev/console from rootfs · 2bd3a997
    Eric W. Biederman authored
    To avoid potential problems with an empty /dev open /dev/console
    from rootfs instead of waiting to mount our root filesystem and
    mounting it there.   This effectively guarantees that there will
    be a device node, and it won't be on a filesystem that we will
    ever unmount, so there are no issues with leaving /dev/console
    open and pinning the filesystem.
    
    This is actually more effective than automatically mounting
    devtmpfs on /dev because it removes removes the occasionally
    problematic assumption that /dev/console exists from the boot
    code.
    
    With this patch I was able to throw busybox on my /boot partition
    (which has no /dev directory) and boot into userspace without
    problems.
    
    The only possible negative consequence I can think of is that
    someone out there deliberately used did not use a character device
    that is major 5 minor 2 for /dev/console.  Does anyone know of a
    situation in which that could make sense?
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
    2bd3a997
do_mounts_initrd.c 3.06 KB