FreeBSD, boot environments and /dev

Hi all,

while still working (slowly) on an answer to my own question on the
right workflow to keep current up to date reliably with boot
environments, I noticed that after creating and mounting a new BE,
that new BE's /dev (eg /mnt/dev) is very sparsely populated:

[22:44:45: ~ 0] $ ll /mnt/dev
total 20
9 dr-xr-xr-x   4 root  wheel   7 Apr 18 00:35 .
9 drwxr-xr-x  23 root  wheel  30 May  5 22:44 ..
1 drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   2 Apr 18 00:35 fd
1 lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  12 Apr 17 20:41 log -> /var/run/log
1 -rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  63 May  3 22:19 null
1 -rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel   1 May  3 22:18 null.bak
1 drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   2 Apr 18 00:35 shm
[22:44:48: ~ 0] $

(no matter whether I use "beadm create" or "bectl create -r")

I can then mount devfs:
# mount -t devfs devfs /mnt/dev

and it will look (and work) as expected (eg for "pkg -c /mnt update"
(*)) ... as long as the BE is mounted.
When I try to boot from (into?) that BE though, it fails, and on the
console I can see messages about missing /dev/... entries. I sneaked a
peek into beinstall.sh, found no inspiration there, I'm afraid.

I believe I noticed this apparent requirement to mount devfs
separately not so long ago ... definitely this year, while I've been
experimenting with boot environments for quite a bit longer. Was I
just lucky all along, or did something change ... and, more
importantly, how do I make my boot environments bootable again?

TIA for hints, pointers, advice
Michael

*) I first noticed something was amiss when "pkg -c /mnt ... "
complained about /dev/null missing, IIRC ...
-- 
Michael Schuster
http://recursiveramblings.wordpress.com/
recursion, n: see 'recursion'