My huge-kernel was also part of the update that initially broke the system; so I couldn't boot into that either. I don't see any advantage of using the slackware install iso over a manjaro-live boot iso (which is more full-featured and easier to use), so I didn't try it.. In fact, I didn't think the slackware install iso was capable of anything aside from installing slackware. But I will keep that in mind and give it a try next time.

Nothing to do with the filesystem type.

1. /dev/ is for device file creation - device names to be used and referred to. It is never as far as I can imagine a place to mount anything of any kind.
   
2. Any directory upon which a filesystem is mounted hides all the files that live there, making them inaccessible.

#2 applied to /dev/ would make a system unusable.

1 members found this post helpful.

Did you actually try to boot with huge or assumed it wouldn't work because it was updated too? Huge image has a lot of extra drivers in it as it is meant to mount the root storage device and root filesystem with no initrd.gz required on most systems. This means it will often boot your system to a console only no network state sufficient to do significant rescue work even if there is a mismatch between the kernel image and module version. Of course if you have unusual hardware or use unusual root filesystem YMMV.

I agree the slackware iso has no advantage and the manjaro-iso makes chrooting into a system easier.

1 members found this post helpful.

You need to know what /dev is for. This is not a real directory but the mountpoint for a virtual filesystem that is used by the kernel to manage hardware. As the kernel identifies drives, partitions and similar hardware at boot, the udev daemon creates device files for them. These are not real files; they have no content and no presence on disk. They are merely access points into the kernel.

Every time a program wants to access hardware, it accesses the corresponding device file. That wakes up the kernel which uses the appropriate driver function to carry out the requested operation. As far as the program is concerned, it has simply been accessing a file and getting a returned result. That makes Linux programming very simple because the programmer does not need to know anything at all about the hardware or how to access it.

Now if you mount something on /dev, it will replace all the virtual device files which udev has created and the kernel will therefore lose all access to hardware such as partitions.

2 members found this post helpful.

yes, I actually tried to boot with it. I'm not sure why it didn't work. I have an Asus TUF X570-PLUS and an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, for reference. I don't think that would qualify as unusual hardware, though.