> > Yes, but it's trivial for people to work around that if they want to..  The
> > main thing is, if you don't have a filesystem, how do you get access to 
> > hardware (existing drivers) from user space?  As someone who's done
> > development for embedded systems in a past life there's ways I could see
> > using this.
> 
> ?? What's so hard about having a file system? Check out how the install
> kernels work. They are one kernel, booted off of a floppy (or the net on
> some architectures or a CD), which also contains an embedded root file
> system. Yes, it's read-only, but it contains all of the programs needed to
> install NetBSD. It also contains device nodes.

for embedded systems something like "romfs" in linux should be usable. the
only lacking (IMHO importand) feature of this (and any other) fs is no
ability to directly map it's files without making copies in memory.