Comment 4 for bug 527216

We've triaged this on #ubuntu-devel today, the problem is that the kernel doesn't pass the device specified by root= to userspace, e.g. by naming it in /proc/self/mountinfo, and instead passes /dev/root. mountall will wait for that device to appear, which it never does, because nothing creates it.

(The kernel doesn't create it in devtmpfs either)

The right fix would be to have udev create /dev/root as a symlink to the device named by MAJOR:MINOR in /proc/self/mountinfo - it makes most sense for this to be a dynamic rule written out by mountall, since it has parsed mountall

We'll need to make sure it's written to /dev/.udev/rules.d - and not written until /dev is actually mounted/remounted (before emitting virtual-filesystems seems like a good place)