It would be useful if the environment in the devshell for images was closer to what it is in do_rootfs since that's probably the kind of environment you'll want for testing things within the image devshell; for example, currently PSEUDO_UNLOAD and PSEUDO_DISABLED are set so you have to unset these if you want to use pseudo (and set PSEUDO_LOCALSTATEDIR so it points into the rootfs).
Patches for discussion on the mailing list. Main pieces merged, just final enabling needed.
Final enablement: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=4dc31a327be1a506e78e1d028db08ceee22a216f
root $ whoami root root $ id uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root) root $ PSEUDO_DISABLED=1 whoami mihai root $ PSEUDO_DISABLED=1 id uid=1000(mihai) gid=1000(mihai) groups=1000(mihai) With "master:b49ddeb11c0319b7ece278fd7cef6b0223114ca9".