dev/console catch 22

[Michael Cashwell]

On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 03:00 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:

> On Monday 18 June 2007, Mike Cashwell wrote:
> > No, as discussed, that just trades a problem on the target (no
> > console) for one on the host (habituating the use of elevated
> > privileges).
> 
> then you're not creating your images correctly ... any sane filesystem image 
> utility allows for device creation and for squashing of permissions in the 
> target image

OK, I've seen some threads (here and elsewhere) about doing this. That
may help with the stand-alone root image but that only covers part of
the workflow we use.

During development we net-boot the targets using an NFS root mount. Once
a dev cycle stabilizes and we want to take the devices off the LAN we
flash an image into them. (In the past this has been cramfs but I'm
considering squashfs.)

So the file hierarchy served by the NFS server must be written by the a
host process and I still have the issue of needing elevated privileges
to do that for the special console node.

The odd part is that all this worked under the 2.4.20 kernel and an
earlier version of Busybox. My hunch is that the now-deprecated devfs
was handling the console node for me without me even knowing it. Under
the new sysfs / mdev we must get further into init before the console
works. That's all just supposition on my part but it's the largest
different from what used to work that I can see.

-Mike