It still is! If you try and boot a kernel with nothing in /dev, you won’t get most of the kernel boot messages since /dev/console doesn’t exist. You need a basic set of device nodes in /dev before udev is started.
If you’re going to rsync a system to new hardware and exclude /dev /proc /sys, it’s better to setup a new mount of your / to a different directory and sync off that, so you get the underlying stuff without the cruft.
Does that not make them a hard link (pointing to a filesystem node) instead of a symlink (pointing to another filename)?
No, you can’t have a hard link cross filesystems and proc is its own fs type.
Ah - it has its own special magical file system type, that’s the secret sauce. Neat!
/dev and /sys are the other two special ones
Remember the old days before /dev was its own virtual filesystem?
It still is! If you try and boot a kernel with nothing in /dev, you won’t get most of the kernel boot messages since /dev/console doesn’t exist. You need a basic set of device nodes in /dev before udev is started.
If you’re going to rsync a system to new hardware and exclude /dev /proc /sys, it’s better to setup a new mount of your / to a different directory and sync off that, so you get the underlying stuff without the cruft.