On Jul 22, 2016, at 5:02 PM, Robert Elz wrote: > the question is just where is that first attempt.
Hmm, it looks like doing "shutdown now" to get into single-user will force-unmount the tmpfs file systems (/etc/rc.d/swap1), so you could be left in a state where creating a regular /dev/null becomes all too easy. As an aside, while testing out things I also noticed that MAKEDEV tries to use $MKNOD in create_mfs_dev(), but this is only set if the -m switch is supplied. So the attempt to make a temporary console fails. Thanks, - Michael