Today a strange problem happened while installing Gentoo Linux. In fact, it was /dev/shm not existing. Quite disturbing if you rely on a stable build system and python. The latter one bails out because of that.

Having a look at an old fstab file I figured that /dev/shm should be a simple and plain tmpfs:

shm /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

So an easy solution might look like that:

mkdir /dev/shm
mount tmpfs /dev/shm -t tmpfs

Solved so far, and we’re moving on to upgrading the kernel…