Comment 4 for bug 1105807

> Ubuntu Precise 12.04.1 without initramfs and 3.8.0-rc4+ kernel.

This is not an Ubuntu kernel, which means you've probably built it yourself. Please check your kernel config. It seems likely that you don't have the kernel configured to automount devtmpfs at boot? The Ubuntu kernels do:

$ grep -i devtmpfs /boot/config-$(uname -r)
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y
CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT=y
$

If you're using devtmpfs, there's no reason to make init mount it when the kernel can do it just as well (and more efficiently). I think this should be regarded as a kernel configuration error more than anything.

It's possible that something further should be done in upstart to handle this corner case, so I'm not closing this report outright; but I don't think it's a good idea to further complicate upstart's special-casing of filesystems at startup.