>>> [...] if your /dev is toast you can't upgrade / to r/w to fix it.
[Mmm, the smell of toasted /dev in the morning. :)]
>> Fortunately, it's not quite that bad.
>> # mount_mfs -s 128 swap /mnt
>> [...]
> Okay, I might buy that, given that MFS is in the GENERIC kernel.

I'm not quite sure what that has to do with it.  Surely you won't try
to maintain that nobody runs anything but GENERIC?

> Except that nobody has ever documented it.  How would a random user
> know to do this?

What business does a "random user" have trying to recover a system with
an even lightly singed /dev?

A random _admin_, on the other hand, should be at least somewhat
imaginative, and I don't see the mfs trick I suggested as requiring all
that much imagination to come up with.

Granted, as someone else pointed out, it's not clear how much help just
hand-crafting a file descriptor for init would be.  It may be possible
in theory to mount an mfs, remount root, and fix /dev.  People like you
and me might even do that rather than go back to whatever was done to
put the system on the disk in the first place (I sure would in cases
where I installed by setting up the disk on another machine).

I wonder if it would be a good idea to add a boot flag to make the
system come up with root mounted RW...couple that with a hand-crafted
console descriptor, and I think the problem that started this
discussion off pretty much evaporates.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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