Well, I see a third possibility - replace MAKEDEV with a program that
grovels kmem and pulls out all the info that you'd like to put in a
devfs. Or even have the kernel produce a nice tree structure via some
new interface that doesn't have all the overhead of a vfs layer. Then
populate a normal plain ffs.

Almost, but not quite, like the solaris "drvconfig, devlinks, .."
programs, at least in concept.

Lets you use the kernel information, without putting the code in the
kernel.

--
Dan.