On 05/04/2010 00:58, Mark Knecht wrote:
One thing about this that still confuses me is where /dev/md3, or whatever, comes from when I boot if the the mknod command is never executed within the chrrot. (As per the install guide.) Not a big deal to proceed and see what happens. Maybe the kernel just creates it based on discovering the RAID? Or it makes it because I explicitly define it at the command line?
Well, it shouldn't matter. The md block device will be initialised by the kernel as soon as it loads, whereupon it will be resolved internally by its registered major/minor numbers for the purpose of mounting the root filesystem (that's the "9, 0" that you referred to earlier in the thread). Once the root filesystem is mounted read-only, it proceeds to load init.
Later, the device node will need to be present - for instance, when fstab is parsed - but udev will have taken care of it by that time. That is, udev will manifest the device node in a tmpfs filesystem which is mounted at /dev and dynamically populated early on during the boot process.
Cheers, --Kerin
