On Sun, 3 Jan 1999, Paul Kranenburg wrote:

: Actually, you may have severe problems using "wide dev_t's" via NFS
: on servers that do not natively use "wide dev_t's".  E.g. on an NFS server
: running SunOS, which has 16-bit device node representations, you'll
: not be able to use any of the high 16 bits in your diskless client's
: /dev directory. All those high bits are simply snipped off by the
: SunOS NFS server code.

Along those lines, I could dig back up a PR I have open on the security
issues of having a different OS's /dev nodes on a NFS server.  query-pr for
"NFS" and "security"; it's fairly recent.

I have been looking into some kind of mfs-based /dev setup, and almost have
something useable sans an appropriate entry for /dev/console (which IMHO
should not *need* to exist in order to run init; the kernel should be
capable of filling in the file descriptors without the /dev node).  Problem
with mfs is the significantly large `disk' needed for a rather small /dev
tree.

Then there's the `devfs' possibility, but I won't go there just yet, and
also a layer filesystem that could translate specially formatted `files'
into device nodes.

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