Diffcult Problem: Remove Devfs From Distro
 

First of all, I'm trying to setup gentoo (but same problem for most distros that uses devfs) and because I'm using a software raid driver that doesnt support devfs, I think devfs is making wrong guesses for the device names and so I can mount root and cant boot.

At first I'm getting "Creating block devices...failed to create /dev/ataraid/disc0/*......" so I thought devfs might not be working properly since my raid software drivers dont support devfs, it's possible that devfs is making the wrong guess. So I've tried doing the following:
1) Disable devfs in the kernel
2) pass "nodevfs" to lilo boot params

Was happy to see that those errors disappeared. But then get a
"Mounting root
mount: error 19 mounting XFS"

First of all I dont know why it's trying to mount a xfs partition, when my root is ext3. So I compiled xfs into the kernel and the same appears, except it's not 19, but 3 error code. At this point, I'm very lost as to how to trouble shoot this. I have made very sure that in my lilo I pointed at the right partition (/dev/ataraid/d0p7) but it seems it's not finding the root (pivot_root later fails and a bunch of other errors).

To solve this, I've tried to pass the major minor code of the device to lilo so I put "root=7107" and that didnt work, before that it was "root=/dev/ataraid/d0p7" and that didnt work also. From the output of my software driver during boot, I see that ataraid/d0pX are being created. But it always fail when it tries to mount root.

Basically when a distro requires devfs to boot, and for some reason I cant use devfs, what should one do? Do you hack devfs to creating the right devices? or do you replace it with something else? Or do you remove it and add /dev in the ramdisk? Or...?


(For a troubleshoot background, I have my software raid drivers compiled as module and it's loaded with a ramdisk. I can see that the drivers and dependent modules (ata_piix ataraid) are all loaded sucessfullly. So I'm lead to believe it's only the mounting part that's left unsolved. All the gentoo configuration/kernel compile/lilo install is done through knoppix)