%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 recommended method of populating the /dev directory with devices is to mount a virtual filesystem (such as ramfs or tmpfs) on the /dev directory, and allow the devices to be created dynamically on that virtual filesystem as they are detected or accessed. This is generally done during the boot process. Since this new system has not been booted, it is necessary to do what the bootscripts would otherwise do by mounting /dev: mount -n -t ramfs none /dev The Udev package is what actually creates the devices in the /dev directory. Since it will not be installed until later on in the process, manually create the minimal set of device nodes needed to complete the building of this system: 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.