http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20098
--- Comment #15 from Alexandre Julliard julliard@winehq.org 2009-09-25 10:22:46 --- The "right" solution is not to use mknod. On any decent distro the devices will be created automatically anyway, and running Windows apps as root is a bad idea.
Not exporting mknod is not because of security, but because it doesn't scale. Obviously mknod by itself is a small thing, but there are 300 system calls and 2000 libc functions for which you could make the same argument, many of which would actually be a lot more useful than mknod which is not something a normal app is supposed to use. There are many ways to address that issue, you can use system(), you can use direct syscalls, you can write a Winelib dll, you can add RDMSR emulation in Wine, or you can just do the right thing and not try to create the device at all. None of these require adding and maintaining Wine-specific exports.