Root on NFSv3 causes major/minor device number oddness

[Oliver Hookins (ohookins@optusnet.com.au)]

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but I haven't managed to 
find any definite answers in my searching.

I have a sparcstation running 2.2.20 which is mounting its root 
filesystem over NFSv3 from an Intel box running 2.4.20. Everything 
appears to work except in /dev all of the device numbers are wrong. 
Basically all of the major and minor numbers are the same, so instead of 
scd0 appear as 11,0 it appears as 11,11.

I've read of others having the same issue, but no solutions. If I mount 
the root filesystem as NFSv2 the problem disappears (as I understand it, 
due to the amount of bits NFSv2 uses to transmit special device file 
attributes or something). Is my problem likely to be configuration, or 
is it the kernel and if so, is the behaviour by design?

Thanks,
Oliver.


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