On Thu, Dec 24, 2015 at 12:45 AM, Lennart Poettering <[email protected]> wrote: > > Why does debootstrap create device nodes at all? Does Debian support > setups with /dev being on persistent media? Note that udev has not > supported non-devtmpfs boots since a long time. If Debian requires > udev, then there's really no point in ever creating a device node in > debootstrap, because devtmpfs does that... > > Lennart >
Well I don't know but I can guess. To start with: Debian doesn't require udev, AFAIK. It's just commonly pulled in by default during installation but not actually required. At any rate the package priority is "important" which is less important than "required" and it's not an "essential" package either. And objectively it's not required because if you are prepared to deal with the hassle and accept the corner cases where it goes wrong, then manual intervention and mknod can replace udev of course. That's how it was done in the "olden days" that kernel programming books would have you start out with (character devices and mknodr before you level up towards automatic device creation using udev...) So it's probably a compatibility thing from the days before udev and of course Debian supports running the FreeBSD kernel (kfreebsd). But from the perspective of a modern Linux distro, setting up device nodes is of course a wrong-headed thing to do and should probably be filed as a RFE bug against debootstrap. (A switch like --no-devices to simply skip unpacking the tar.gz file and everybody wins.) Some related bug reports: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=571136 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=731802 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=698347 From what I can see, as things stand if you want to bootstrap a Debian image as a normal user you probably should use multistrap or brickstrap (a more highlevel frontend to multistrap) https://wiki.debian.org/Multistrap https://blog.mister-muffin.de/2014/01/11/why-do-i-need-superuser-privileges-when-i-just-want-to-write-to-a-regular-file/ https://github.com/ev3dev/brickstrap _______________________________________________ systemd-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/systemd-devel
