Date:        Tue, 10 Jul 2001 21:53:52 GMT
    From:        christos@zoulas.com (Christos Zoulas)
    Message-ID:  <GGA25s.1vz@tac.nyc.ny.us>

  | Interesting... Writing to writable files on a readonly filesystem is
  | dissallowed.

This shouldn't be surprising, writing to a device is not writing to the
filesystem that contains the inode for the device, it is writing to
wherever the device wants the data to be put (same for /dev/null /dev/tty
/dev/anything else).

  | What happens to the mtime of the device?

That's on the read only filesystem, so that can't be touched.

kre