Subject: Re: MAKEDEV is not portable
To: Robert Evans <r.evans@ic.ac.uk>
From: Todd Vierling <tv@pobox.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 01/03/1999 08:28:29
On Sun, 3 Jan 1999, Robert Evans wrote:

: > 	1. Provide a dev.tgz
: > 	    Extract with gtar (if system's native tar failed on dev nodes)
: 
: This would be useful, and was suggested by Simon Gerraty (?) in the
: discussion attached to the problem report I mentioned.

What keeps being missed here is the fact that device nodes are formatted
differently on Solaris 2 systems and NetBSD systems (and even SunOS vs.
NetBSD, if you include some of the newer >16bit device nodes).  This is a
*very* old thread that I have yet to dig back up.

NEITHER mknod nor gtar will help you here - both work with split major and
minor device numbers instead of a 32-bit combined dev_t.

What we ned to have is some sort of cross-mknod that can DTRT with NetBSD
device numbering.  See <sys/types.h> for the arrangement of NetBSD dev_t's.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)