Want advice on Sys III mnttab function and enhancement

[silver at csu-cs.UUCP]

/etc/mnttab  (the mount  table) is a mere shadow of the "true"  internal
table kept by the kernel.  Mnttab is  manipulated by the mount,  umount,
and  setmnt  commands.  It can and often  does  contain  "junk"  entries
(devices  not truly  mounted),  either  for a good  reason or because of
failure  to  clean  up after a system  crash or  physical  removal  of a
volume.  The  only  "good  reason"  I know  of is the use of  setmnt  in
/etc/rc to put the root volume in the table, where it can be found by df
and other commands.  I have two questions:

1:  Are there any other good reasons for the tables to be  separate,  or
    is this YAHK (yet another historical kludge)?

2:  We're  considering  a kernel mod so you can either read the internal
    table directly (via a new intrinsic) or have accesses to /etc/mnttab
    magically  reference the internal  table, which would always contain
    the root  volume  as the  first  entry.  Writes to the  table  would
    appear to succeed but change nothing (which makes setmnt  obsolete).
    Do you see any  difficulties  with these  approaches, or the general
    idea of merging tables?

Please mail me comments, and I'll summarize if there's enough  interest.
Thanks!

Alan Silverstein, Hewlett-Packard Fort Collins Systems Division, Colorado
ucbvax!hplabs!hpfcld!ajs, 303-226-3800 x3053, N 40 31'31" W 105 00'43"