%general-entities; ]> /dev/* When the kernel boots the system, it requires the presence of a few device nodes, in particular the console and null devices. Create these by running the following commands: mknod -m 600 /dev/console c 5 1 mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3 The ideal way to populate /dev is to mount a ramfs onto /dev, like tmpfs, and create the devices on there during each bootup. Since the system has not been booted, it is necessary to do what the bootscripts would otherwise do and populate /dev. Begin by mounting /dev: mount -n -t ramfs none /dev Since the Udev package will not be installed until later on in the process, create a minimal set of device nodes used for building: mknod -m 622 /dev/console c 5 1 mknod -m 666 /dev/null c 1 3 mknod -m 666 /dev/zero c 1 5 mknod -m 666 /dev/ptmx c 5 2 mknod -m 666 /dev/tty c 5 0 mknod -m 444 /dev/random c 1 8 mknod -m 444 /dev/urandom c 1 9 chown root:tty /dev/{console,ptmx,tty} There are some symlinks and directories required by LFS that are not created by Udev, so create those here: ln -s /proc/self/fd /dev/fd ln -s /proc/self/fd/0 /dev/stdin ln -s /proc/self/fd/1 /dev/stdout ln -s /proc/self/fd/2 /dev/stderr ln -s /proc/kcore /dev/core mkdir /dev/pts mkdir /dev/shm Finally, mount the proper virtual (kernel) file systems on the newly-created directories: mount -t devpts -o gid=4,mode=620 none /dev/pts mount -t tmpfs none /dev/shm The mount commands executed above may result in the following warning message: can't open /etc/fstab: No such file or directory. This file—/etc/fstab—has not been created yet but is also not required for the file systems to be properly mounted. As such, the warning can be safely ignored.