one more comment: the DS2406 seems to be fully supported if look on the owfs.org website and part of the packages they make for different distributions. I could not find any source code there though.

Using OWFS is not ideal but it is ready to be used. Just adding support for the device maybe a quick and dirty solution. I agree this kind of hardware extension support should be part of the kernel to get best performance. I will try to find out on how devices are detected by OWFS and added to the fuse filesystem with the use of their correspondig device driver. I have send you a private mail for your address.