I'm in the middle of compiling 2.6.12 (upgrading from 2.4.26). I've been doing it a few times, because of problems finding my NIC drivers, but in the meantime I've revealed another issue:
With 2.4.26 I boot up in < 30 seconds.
With 2.6.12, the system sits on a line saying "Initializing udev devices..." for the better part of a minute!
What the heck is udev, and since my system was working perfectly well before this new kernel I can't imagine that it's necessary.
That being the case, I'd like to get rid of it. I haven't installed any new software, so it must be a kernel module. Does anyone know where, in the dialog brought up by 'make menuconfig', it's located?

*It can't be "just a 2.6 thing", as my suse box is now 2.6.11, and its boot time still beats a minute and a half all hollow.

Thanks!

udev manges the device nodes in /dev. It automaticlly creates and removes them as you plugin, remove hardware. It's not necessary, but if you remove it you had better be sure that you have a full static /dev or your machine won't boot.

I've never seen udev stall for that long on bootup, did you check and see if a newer version of that package was available?

I have seen the slow udev problem, I was running udev 030 and after updating to kernels 2.6.11 and later udev would time out on creating certain device nodes, the fix was to upgrade to udev 058 (the current version).

HTH

Mad.

Hmm. That doesn't appear to be the whole problem. I did some research and made sure I was loading the correct device drivers (I am), and still with udev I have no ethernet card. It simply comes up as "device not found" when I try to initialize it with ifconfig, and ls /dev/ | grep eth0 returns nothing.

I'd really like to know how to make 2.6 behave the same way 2.4 did, i.e. with devfs. 2.4 worked, 2.6 isn't. My SuSE box is running 2.6.11, and I assume uses udev. The kernel on that system doesn't recognize the filesystem sysfs, according to the messages that scroll by when it boots up, so there's got to be a way to merge the two.

As a side note, though..assuming that I can get my ethernet card working, how did you find out which version of udev you were running? From what I can see from the man page there isn't any flag to give you the version.

Ha! Got it working. For whatever reason compiling the drivers into the kernel didn't want to work, but when I switched them to being modules, it worked like a charm.
Ditto for a couple of ALSA sound drivers...they showed up once I switched them to module instead of built-ins.

So, the only question which remains is, how can I determine which version of udev I currently have running?

Thanks!