Historically, access to devices by anyone other than root has been a slight hassle under BSD. Joerg Anslik’s changes to MAKEDEV have been committed, which, among other things, allows for a /etc/devices.conf that controls individual permissions for different devices, such as the CD drive.
A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Hey I was wondering what the plans are with /dev. Are there plans for porting the FreeBSD devfs? If so how long are they, or if not why?
There was conversation about this a while back; search this site to see if I linked to it, or on the kernel@ mailing list.