The following reply was made to PR port-amd64/35532; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods@planix.com>
To: NetBSD GNATS <gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org>
Cc: <ef@math.uni-bonn.de>, <tron@netbsd.org>
Subject: Re: port-amd64/35532 (Impossible to update an amd64 to 4.0)
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:09:27 -0500

 Note that the fix for this PR breaks init(8)'s attempt to create an MFS
 filesystem for /dev, including in the netbsd-4 INSTALL systems,
 resulting in sysint failing with "openpty() failed" whenever it tries to
 run any command in a window.
 
 The best fix is to totally eliminate the rediculous limit imposed by
 init(8) on size of the MFS partition.  Inodes are not that big.
 
 It's also rather silly to set the fixed number of inodes -- instead
 mount_mfs should be allowed to calculate them directly by simply giving
 it a reasonable value for the '-i' parameter, e.g. 140, and then making
 the whole filesystem a reasonable number of blocks in total size,
 e.g. 768 sectors (if you don't need space for MAKEDEV(*)):
 
   # mount_mfs -i 140 -s 768 -b 4096 -f 512 swap /mnt  
   # BLOCKSIZE=512 df -i /mnt                         
   Filesystem 512-blocks     Used    Avail %Cap    iUsed  iAvail %iCap Mounted on
   mfs:17751          31        1       28   3%        1     2717   0% /mnt
 
 There, that should be enough for anyone for a long time yet, i.e. for
 all of "MAKEDEV all".
 
 I'd send patches, but my current change-set also moves MAKEDEV to /sbin
 and MAKDEDEV.local to /etc and totally gets rid of all the file copying
 nonsense that's currently needed.  Having a script in /dev was always
 silly and unnecssary.
 
 -- 
 						Greg A. Woods
 
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