Nudged by private email from mcr, I was thinking about what I posted
earlier about switching from 8 partitions per pack to 16 partitions per
pack.

The only reason you care what's in /dev, actually, is so you can
remount root read/write.  And it occurred to me: *you don't need /dev*
to do that!

Try this: boot single-user.

# mount -t kernfs kernfs /kern
# mount -o update /kern/rootdev /

Et voila! a read/write root without needing to even care whether disk
device nodes *exist* in /dev.  At this point you can rerun MAKEDEV or
whatever.

Of course, you need kernfs in the kernel.  Alternatively, it might be
possible to tweak things a little so that it's possible to update an
ffs mount (eg, RO->RW) without needing to specify a device name...which
would arguably be a Good Thing anyway.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
		     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B