%general-entities; ]> /dev/* Applications running in user space utilize various file systems created by the kernel to communicate with the kernel itself. These file systems are virtual: no disk space is used for them. The content of these file systems resides in memory. These file systems must be mounted in the $LFS directory tree so the applications can find them in the chroot environment. Begin by creating the directories on which these virtual file systems will be mounted: mkdir -pv $LFS/{dev,proc,sys,run} During a normal boot of an LFS system, the kernel automatically mounts the devtmpfs file system on the /dev directory; the kernel creates device nodes on that virtual file system during the boot process, or when a device is first detected or accessed. The udev daemon may change the ownership or permissions of the device nodes created by the kernel, and create new device nodes or symlinks, to ease the work of distro maintainers and system administrators. (See for details.) If the host kernel supports &devtmpfs;, we can simply mount a &devtmpfs; at $LFS/dev and rely on the kernel to populate it (i.e., the udev daemon will do the necessary work automatically). But some host kernels lack &devtmpfs; support; these host distros use different methods to create the content of /dev. So the only host-agnostic way to populate the $LFS/dev directory is by bind mounting the host system's /dev directory. A bind mount is a special type of mount that generates a duplicate copy of a directory or mount point at some other location. Use the following command to do this. mount -v --bind /dev $LFS/dev Now mount the remaining virtual kernel file systems: mount -v --bind /dev/pts $LFS/dev/pts mount -vt proc proc $LFS/proc mount -vt sysfs sysfs $LFS/sys mount -vt tmpfs tmpfs $LFS/run In some host systems, /dev/shm is a symbolic link to /run/shm. The /run tmpfs was mounted above so in this case only a directory needs to be created. In other host systems /dev/shm is a mount point for a tmpfs. In that case the mount of /dev above will only create /dev/shm as a directory in the chroot environment. In this situation we must explicitly mount a tmpfs: if [ -h $LFS/dev/shm ]; then mkdir -pv $LFS/$(readlink $LFS/dev/shm) else mount -t tmpfs -o nosuid,nodev tmpfs $LFS/dev/shm fi