What the heck is going on out there?

[Tom Horsley]

I loaded latest rawhide updates on my f10 beta partition,
and didn't get around to rebooting for a day or two.

Of the many rpms installed, possibly relevant are:

kernel-2.6.27-3.fc10.x86_64
PackageKit-udev-helper-0.3.6-3.fc10.x86_64
xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.5.2-2.fc10.x86_64

Now when it boots, I get a bunch of messages right
after it says "starting udev" that say something like
"unable to create device loop1", loop2, etc. "unable
to create device lp1", lp2, etc. "unable to create device
nvidia1", nvidia 2, etc.

Then it gets through the rest of the service startup
messages and tries to bring up X, and just flickers
furiously for a while and hangs (but at least it isn't
hung hard - Ctrl-Alt-Del will reboot it).

If I try booting the previous kernel (which previously
worked fine), I see the same device errors at the
same point, so it doesn't appear to be a kernel specific
thing, but something installed in userland by the
latest updates.

I can boot at runlevel 3 and it doesn't hang, but I still
get the weird device messages at udev time.

Any clues?