>>With the advent of longfile names on a MSDOS formatted drive, and =
>>NetBSD's ability  to read them, what are the odds that I can put a =
>>NetBSD kernel on my root drive, add /sbin, /bin, /etc, etc. directories =
>>to the drive and populate them with NetBSD binaries and boot NetBSD?
>
>You can't put /dev on an msdosfs; MSDOS doesn't grok device nodes.

Hmm.  How about a "devfs" which is like an automounted mfs but has nodes
precreated for /dev/console, /dev/null, and the root and swap devices.
Modify \ETC\RC (:-) to fill in the remainder using mknod and you'd be all set.
(Well, except for socket files that get created in random places, which
MSDOSFS also doesn't understand.)

(The problem with this suggestion is that without a lot of rearchitecting,
its implementation would be a gross hack.  However, there are UNIX-like
operating systems where /dev gets built on the fly every boot (without
relying on using mknod, either).)