Hi yall,

I just reinstalled mdk9.1 on my laptop and upgraded the kernel to 2.4.22mdk. Now devfsd does not start up. I also cannot start it manually. The problem is that I lost /dev/.devfsd. I have not seen any adverse effects so far. The /dev is just the old and humongous list of any and all possible device names and I can use all my hardware. And login is now a lot faster... Two questions:

1. Are there any adverse effects I should worry about?

2. Is it possible to recreate the /dev/.devfsd file? The man page for devfsd is very sketchy on this part. It does not say how or when it gets created and does not say what it actually does what /etc/devfsd.conf does not do.

BTW, the issue is not the 2.4.22mdk kernel running on mdk9.1. I installed it before on a 9.1 installation on this very same laptop and had no problems. It is also currently installed on my desktop w/o problems. I don't remember messing with /dev after installing (was only last night) but I guess I did something bad.

problem solved
rather problem disappeared. I just checked because all of a sudden I could not access devices and, lo anad behold as they say, I had my /dev/.devfsd back and all the flat device files were gone. Now I can start devfsd which brings back the symlink versions of the device files.

Anyone know what was going on? What is running in the background that would do this?

Update.

I rebooted and devfsd was dead again. Somehow, /dev/.devfsd got lost again.
got back into windows user mode and reinstalled and installed new kernel and problem reappeared. Strange Well, installed again (it's the only reliable way I've found so far to get devfsd to work again - not having it makes trouble for playing dvds) it's fine for now except I don't dare installing the new kernel. I'll make another installation on a separate partition to see what's up.