FreeBSD 5, chroot and /dev

[Henrik W Lund]

Hanspeter Roth wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I have built a new kernel on a FreeBSD 5.2 system which doesn't boot
>anymore. So I took a Freesbee and mounted the filesystems from the
>harddisk and changed root to the harddisk's one. But there were no
>devices in /dev. I tried some of /etc/rc.d/dev*. This only created a
>/dev/null.
>Trying to build the kernel (with a different configuration) fails.
>A regular file /dev/stdout has been created.
>
>What is the recommended way to create the device nodes in /dev in a
>chroot environment?
>
>-Hanspeter
>  
>
Greetings!

I may be wrong here, but I think that in the 5.x system, /dev is 
populated at boottime, courtesy of the GEOM layer and the devfs 
filesystem. These two operate together, GEOM detecting hardware and 
giving it proper device nodes in the special devfs filesystem (which is 
mounted under /dev, if you check your fstab).

So, messing with device nodes in a chrooted 5.x system is not possible 
(someone correct me here, if I'm wrong). What happens when you try to 
boot it normally?

-Henrik W Lund