Comment 2 for bug 576429

Thanks for the great bug report. Your description of the problem made it really simple to track down the misbehavior.

I think we can fix this by changing how parse_numeric deals with numeric root devices. udev creates symlinks in /dev/block/ for every block device it creates. For instance, I have a /dev/block/8:1 that's a symlink to /dev/sda1

So instead of mknod'ing /dev/root with an appropriate major/minor numbers, we can just change ROOT to the appropriate /dev/block/major:minor symlink, and wait-for-root should handle that case gracefully.

I've pushed a patch to lp:~broder/ubuntu/natty/initramfs-tools/fix-576429, but before I ask for sponsorship, I'd like to get some verification that it works as desired.

I've uploaded versions of initramfs-tools with this patch for lucid, maverick, and natty to my PPA (https://launchpad.net/~broder/+archive/ubuntu-tests). Could you please test whichever version is most convenient and let me know if the patch works?