"John F. Woods" writes:
> It also occurred to me that NFS-mounted partitions can have device
> nodes on them (doh!), and NFS will not export some mysterious flag
> from the FFS superblock telling you how to interpret device numbers.
> That would argue for the 31-bit number scheme, I think.

Unnecessary. Note that you can distinguish old and new trivially, by
the expedient of noting that the top 16 bits of old are always
zero. This means that /dev/console (as 0,0) is the only special case
you have to worry about.

Perry