Occasional stuck at boot-up line "Waiting for /dev to be fully populated"

Question

On Linux Kernel 3 boot-up occasionally gets stuck at line:

Waiting for /dev to be fully populated...

Prior to that line I can see USB device enumeration errors:

usb 2-1.2.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32
usb 2-1.2.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32
usb 2-1.2.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32
usb 2-1.2.3: device descriptor read/64, error -32
usb 2-1.2.3: device not accepting address 12, error -32

It looks like one of my USB devices cannot be enumerated and so the kernel cannot finish population of /dev and just hangs there (until my watchdog kicks in). I wonder if we can tell the kernel to not hang when a USB device cannot be enumerated. Since I can reset the faulty USB device later, this would be an acceptable workaround for me.

Answer 1

In /etc/init.d/udev I changed line

if udevadm settle; then

to

if udevadm settle --timeout=10; then

This will stop waiting for /dev to be fully populated after 10 seconds. The default timeout was 180 seconds.