How to disable udev for a faster boot?

I am trying to make gentoo boot faster and in my searching I came across this article lwn.net/Articles/299483/ Booting Linux in five seconds. One of the things they did was revert to a "persistent, old-school /dev directory so that boot doesn't depend on udev". I would like to know how to do this, but when I searched for disabling udev all the forums say that its a bad idea. All I want to know is how to make a static /dev directory. If someone could tell me how to do this or even just point me in the right direction I would really appreciate it.

If I remember correctly, you would use mknod for creating devices files.
There was also a script "makedev" available that does so automatically for some hardware.

Have a look into LinuxFromScratch. They explain it.

Why don't you just suspend to RAM ? You would be up in less than 3 seconds !

My advice would be to not disable udev. I don't think the hassle and effort of maintaining a static /dev is worth the gains in boot time.

There are some other ways to improve boot speeds. Udev probes your hardware and autoloads modules. You can disable this and specify your modules manually. Not sure how Gentoo does it, but it's fairly trivial to do in Arch.

Thanks for the advice. The reason why I wanted a static /dev was because I tried to use the finit-arc but I think because arch linux uses bsd style init the scripts like udev and hal didn't start. I tried to modify everything needed for boot to be like the arch linux for example the rc.conf, and I got everything working like loading modules but I couldn't figure out how to start the services. The only thing I really needed to load was udev but I figured it would be easier to just use a static /dev. So I put a line in the finittab to cp a saved /dev directory to /dev and everything was working except for my wireless card which couldn't find the firmware for some weird reason. Anyway I booted into x in 7 seconds but there is still a few things that don't work like terminals couldn't access the psuedo-ptty even though it worked for root and the permissions were set right.

Actually getting suspend to ram to work is my next task just for practicality, but I wanted to get as close to the 5 second boot as possible just for fun.

Thanks reed9 I think that your right. I read through all the arch documentation and it is fairly trivial I just couldn't figure out how to convert it to a gentoo system. so I think that I will just revert back to the old boot and experiment more with openrc, readahead, and making my kernel load faster.

If there is anyone out there that knows how to make the finit-arc work in gentoo, or even how to get another fast-init/finit type of init to work in gentoo please let me know. I think the best for gentoo is probably something like einit, mininit, or initng. At least those are the ones I found in portage, I will be testing these out also. Maybe if I can learn enough about it I will just write my own init.