I was thinking about udev a bit and did an experiment. I disabled udev and udev_retry from the boot process. The system came up just fine.
The console worked, but I didn't try to disconnect or reconnect the (usb) mouse or keyboard. I tried startxfce and the screen came up, but mouse and keyboard did not work. However, ssh worked fine. Even xclock worked from the remote system. Boot time was interesting. The boot scripts took only three seconds: Sep 21 01:04:59 +00:00 (none) Mounting virtual file systems: ... ... Sep 21 01:05:01 +00:00 blfs Bringing up the eth0 interface... Sep 21 01:05:02 +00:00 blfs Adding IPv4 address xxx to the eth0 interface... OK Sep 21 01:05:02 +00:00 blfs Setting up default gateway... OK Sep 21 01:05:02 +00:00 blfs Starting ntpd... OK Sep 21 01:05:02 +00:00 blfs Starting SSH Server... OK $ dmesg | tail [ 7.717871] e1000e: eth0 NIC Link is Up 100 Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: Rx/Tx [ 7.717875] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: eth0: 10/100 speed: disabling TSO [ 7.718341] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready The bottom line is that setting up a server: apache, ftp, etc, does not always need udev. This may be especially useful for a virtual system like kvm where you don't try to access from hardware anyway. ---- Did another experiment. In inittab I disabled all calls to agetty. Of course I could not access via the keyboard, but dmesg ends with: [ 6.691305] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): eth0: link becomes ready The boot log runs from Sep 21 01:40:48 to 01:40:50. ssh still works fine. Looking at where the boot time is being taken: ACPI 1.3 seconds ethernet initialization 0.2 seconds disk setup 0.6 seconds usb setup 0.5 seconds Mounting partitions starts at about the 4.5 second mark and is completed by 4.7 seconds. The rest of the time until 6.7 is waiting for the ethernet connection to come up. Interesting. -- Bruce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
