mkinitrd: device /dev/ does not have a driver

I recently ran into an issue when trying to update the kernel on my openSUSE 11.0 system. When installing the kernel and mkinitrd ran during the kernel rpm post-scriptlet mkinitrd would fail. When I ran it on my own I would get:

Fatal storage error. device /dev/ does not have a driver

I dove into the code for mkinitrd and found 2 spots where it was getting hung up on having '/dev/' as a value in a variable called blockdev.

One was in /lib/mkinitrd/scripts/setup-block.sh and another in /lib/mkinitrd/scripts/setup-iscsi.sh.

The variable blockdev is a space delimited list of devices that these scripts loop through and execute commands against with for loops. The for loops looks like:

for bd in $blockdev; do

So each value in blockdev then get assigned temporarily to bd. I therefore added a further check right after the for bd in $blockdev; do line to check if variable bd equals exactly /dev/ and if so to skip that value:

if [ "$bd" == "/dev/" ]; then
verbose "[BLOCK] ignoring $bd (gaf)"
continue
fi

So before:

...
for bd in $blockdev; do
...

And after:

...
for bd in $blockdev; do
if [ "$bd" == "/dev/" ]; then
verbose "[BLOCK] ignoring $bd (gaf)"
continue
fi
...

I'm guessing /dev/ is being included into the blockdev variable erroneously, but I'm not gonna waste anymore time figuring that part out. :P

Hope this helps as I didn't see anyone with a solution to this issue when searching for one myself (to save time ...).

NOTE: This issue seems to be addressed in 11.2 after some update (still an issue in base 11.2). I ran into it while upgrading to 11.2 from 11.0.