Subject: Re: PR 7170 -- init and /dev/console
To: Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
From: Charles M. Hannum <abuse@spamalicious.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 04/29/2001 20:56:28
On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 12:24:03PM +1000, Simon Burge wrote:
> 
> > Plus, in anything other than a diskless environment, if your /dev is
> > toast you can't upgrade / to r/w to fix it.  So it didn't seem like
> > much of a gain, and I punted.
> 
> Not entirely true.  If you have kernfs, you can do something like (from
> memory):
> 
> 	mount -t kernfs /kern /kern
> 	mount -u /kern/rootdev /
> 
> or thereabouts...

Too bad that doesn't actually work.

Due to some very nasty problems with vnode aliases, kernfs is coded to
use vfinddev(), which only works if a device node for the device has
already been cached.  In this case, it will return ENOENT.

You might want to try your advice in the future...