-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 40568 Nov 17 04:39 /sbin/init

On UEFI system:

journalctl -b | grep init
Nov 24 08:34:06 localhost kernel: Kernel command line: root=/dev/sdd4 rootfstype=ext4 init=/usr/lib/systemd/systemd
Nov 24 08:34:06 localhost kernel: Memory: 16342392K/16694868K available (5447K kernel code, 813K rwdata, 1940K rodata, 1000K init, 588K bss, 352476K reserved, 0K cma-reserved)
Nov 24 08:34:06 localhost kernel: devtmpfs: initialized
.........

This (fresh) unstable gentoo was installed from
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 249804534 Nov 19 15:30 stage3-amd64-20161117.tar.bz2 file.
I have also almost identical gentoo instalation (the same UEFI laptop,
Sep 19 08:28 stage3-amd64-20160915.tar.bz2), but
using openrc - here usb_modeswitch-2.4.0 works without any problems.
On openrc:
ls -l /mnt/mnt2/sbin/init
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 40568 Sep 15 05:38 /mnt/mnt2/sbin/init


On both systems there is no /etc/init directory
nor usb-modeswitch-upstart.conf file on the whole systems.

All files provided by usb-modeswitch:
/etc
/etc/usb_modeswitch.conf
/etc/usb_modeswitch.d
/lib
/lib/udev
/lib/udev/rules.d
/lib/udev/rules.d/40-usb_modeswitch.rules
/lib/udev/usb_modeswitch
/usr
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/systemd
/usr/lib/systemd/system
/usr/lib/systemd/system/usb_modeswitch@.service
/usr/sbin
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch
/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch_dispatcher
/usr/share
/usr/share/doc
.....
/usr/share/man
/usr/share/man/man1
/usr/share/man/man1/usb_modeswitch.1.bz2
/usr/share/man/man1/usb_modeswitch_dispatcher.1.bz2
/usr/share/usb_modeswitch
/usr/share/usb_modeswitch/03f0:002a
.......
/var
/var/lib
/var/lib/usb_modeswitch

Hi Josh,

I can't comment for the original op, but running Gentoo myself (kernel 4.8.3, sysvinit 2.88, udev 230 /sbin/init is a binary itself, not a symlink.



Probably I'm somewhat "behind the times", but even with a /usr on a separate (unmounted by the time udev starts) my system works well. My only problem that I've got at the moment (at least that I'm aware of) is my modem doesn't switch on bootup ... and that's not a major problem for me.