After making a /dev/usb/usbmouse0 and assigning it to c,10,32, then loading the necessary modules, USB mice worked fine under RedHat 6.1 with the development kernels. However, after updating to 6.2, that device is no longer available. It comes back with a message "no such device" when trying to access it, and in the syslog it says "cannot load module char-major-10-32" even though the necessary modules are loaded.
Just a little note to whomever changed the category - this isn't a problem with the kernel package, because I'm using a development kernel, which is not included with the RH distribution anyway. The problem is something other than the kernel.
I recieved a tip from someone on the linux-kernel list: Changing the device to c, 13, 32 (major number 13 instead of 10) fixed this problem for some odd reason - I'd still like to know why this happened.
The dev package has never had any USB devices in it, nor does MAKEDEV know how to make them. The devices.txt file doesn't mention them using major 10 or 13. How/when did you create them? Did you upgrade from one development kernel to another?
I'm almost positive I had changed kernel versions before upgrading RedHat 6.1 to 6.2 without any problems with the USB mouse, but it seems that I'm wrong from what I've discovered. It turns out that the /dev settings for USB mice have changed THREE times over the last few kernel versions - so fast that even the maintainers could not keep the documentation (devices.txt AND usb/hid.txt) up to date, so noone could have known what the new settings were. Since it looks like everything's back to normal now, you can set the bug to WORKSFORME or RESOLVED.
I'll tag it as DEFERRED; it's something we'll have to update both the dev and MAKEDEV packages for when the kernel hits 2.4.0, which hopefully will be in time to be included in the next release of Red Hat Linux. Thanks.