On 10th Oct 2013 in revision r256256 FreeBSD has changed rc.d script for running jails. The new version uses configuraion from /etc/jail.conf file instead of /etc/rc.conf entries. This change exposed a problem where devfs was not importing default rules anymore – therefore option devfs_ruleset was ignored.

I came across that issue yesterday and wasted some time trying to figure out what the root cause was. The problem exists because new rc.d script is no longer causing side effect of loading default rules from /etc/defaults/devfs.rules. This issue was discovered some time ago and in revision r231194 fix was commited by adding new rc.conf option devfs_load_rulesets defaulting to NO. Setting the options to YES in /etc/rc.conf and running

service devfs restart

will bring the defaults from /etc/defaults/devfs.rules and your local changes from/etc/devfs.rules to life just like the old side effect did. During migration to /etc/jail.conf don’t forget to insert rule number instead of its name in devfs_ruleset option!