Thanks. In fact I was planning to replace mdev with devtmpfs. I have analyzed the code sizes and the behaviors between the two, and concluded that devtmpfs is the winner. However, I wish to document clearly the analysis and the rationale for switching, and unfortunately I don't have much time these days to maintain this. (BTW, I'm sort of a perfectionist in this project and I wish to configure a new kernel with as minimal size as possible, in order to bring down the memory requirements for older machines.)
QEMU and other virtualizations are not in my support scope. Although I do test this image in VirtualBox before trying in my real laptop. If you can pin down the problem then I may try fix that, but don't expect anything.