Re: what is ptyfsoldnodes?

[Martin Husemann <martin%duskware.de@localhost>]

On Sun, Feb 08, 2026 at 03:55:45PM -0600, Ted Spradley wrote:
> I saw the 11.0_RC1 announcement so I tried it out on my OrangePi 5+
> (RK3588) using sysupgrade from 10.1_stable from less than a week ago.
> 
> Several postinstall checks failed, but the message said to run
> postinstall with a list of things to fix, and that fixed all but
> 'ptyfsoldnodes'. I don't know what that is or where to find info about
> it. Can somebody offer a clue?

Old pty dev nodes is a hack that we use on some install media to save
space, but that is not considered to be safe during normal multi-user
usage.

They are called /dev/ttyp0 .. /dev/ttypN and /dev/ptyp0 .. /dev/ptypN
usually and you can just remove them if you have a ptyfs mounted on
/dev/pts. You can check the latter by looking at the output of the
mount command and/or checking /etc/fstab for a line like:

ptyfs                   /dev/pts                ptyfs   rw


If you are running with /dev on a ram disk created at boottime by init
this postinstall warning might re-occcur after the next boot (and there
is no clean solution currently for this kind of setup). The mount command
output will tell you if /dev is a tmpfs.

Martin