Hello forum,

I installed Gentoo 2008 from the minimal install CD but I forgot to follow one step of the installation instructions from the x86 Gentoo Handbook about mounting the /proc directory on the CD to the /proc directory on the partition I was installing Gentoo on. I forgot to run the following command:

mount -t proc none /mnt/gentoo/proc

I then continued to install the stage three tarball and the portage tarball and the installation seemed successful and I can boot up to a nice prompt and I ran emerge --sync with no problems (no gui installed yet).

In your opinion, will this installation be stable and not cause any problems later on down the road since I forgot to mount /proc? Or should I reformat and start all over again and include the missing step? Exactly why should /proc be mounted?

Thank you,
Roy

hello rrrssssss,

You have to install the stagetarball before mounting /proc to gentoo/proc since the gentoo/proc directory is created while extracting the tarball.
in my opinion, if you didn't experience any problems while the installation everything is ok.
proc is a pseudofilesystem which manages the access to processes within the kernel and kernelmodules. If you mount the /proc filesystem to your chroot-environment you make it possible to access this kernelprocesses from within the chroot environment.

Markus

Thank you for the response markush

I typed it wrong in my original post. I did install the stage 3 tarball before I forgot to mount /proc.

I feel a little better now but it still bugs me a little.

Keep up the good work.

All the best,
Roy

There's absolutely no problem, as said, if you had not a single problem during the installation, it really doesn't matter. /proc doesn't truly exist in the same sense that the rest of the fs's. /proc is a convenient way to access the OS structures in an fs-like fashion, but it only exists in the kernel memory, and not in the disk as the rest of the fs's do.

In /proc you can see, amongst many other things, a whole image of the kernel allocated memory that will be big but as said don't worry since it doesn't take any disk space at all (/proc/kcore), structures relevant to the current processes (a lot of dirs named with numbers under /proc, like /proc/1 and so on), and some others created by specific drivers or kernel parts, like /proc/cpuinfo. This structures can be navigated and some of them can be viewed with a simple "cat <filename>" to get live info about your kernel and drivers, processes, etc.

This is created by the kernel itself, so there's nothing from the livecd or the install phase remaining in there. Don't worry.