Can't open /dev/ttyO2: No such file or directory (buildroot-2010.08)

Lately I have been using a beagle-xm and a lent pandaboard, with an old minimal file system (buildroot 2010.08) and newest kernels 2.6.39+, and encountered this message whenever I wanted to boot anything beyond 2.6.39.

Can't open /dev/ttyO2: No such file or directory

I realized the kernel version in the top Makefile was affecting after few git bisect runs, and then confirmed by playing with it for 3.0+ kernels.

Although I knew there was something wrong with udev and user space I didn't have the time to dig into it and just modified the version in the top Makefile while compiling the kernel (from 3.0+ to 2.6.X).

Later I discovered the issue was in my filesystem:

/etc/init.d/S10udev:19

# old kernels don't use udev
case $(uname -r) in
    2.6*|2.7*)  ;;
    *)          exit 0;;
esac

As it turns out newer kernels don't use udev either ;) according to the script.

Removing those lines from the udev start script gives your ttyO2 console back.

This was fixed in one of the latest buildroot releases, I didn't check which one, but the udev start script doesn't have the kernel version check in buildroot 2011.08.

However, the latest version doesn't quite work for me, so, until I find some time to check what I'm missing I'll stick to 2010.08.

On a side issue:

If you ever re-download buildroot-2010.08 and build from scratch, you're likely to face a build break during:

gzip: buildroot-2010.08/dl/fakeroot_1.9.5.tar.gz: not in gzip format
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

Which is caused by a broken fakeroot link.

The bad:

http://snapshot.debian.net/archive/2008/04/27/debian/pool/main/f/fakeroot//fakeroot_1.9.5.tar.gz

The good:

http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20080427T000000Z/pool/main/f/fakeroot/fakeroot_1.9.5.tar.gz

Just download from the good link and replace fakeroot tarball in:

    buildroot-2010.08/dl/fakeroot_1.9.5.tar.gz

And continue the build.