As said in change GERRIT-CHANGE, we should advertise only the notification capability "urn:ietf:params:netconf:capability:notification:1.0" and we do not need to provide the model. We do exactly this in our netconf simulator(which is built on  ODL simulator), but as it turns out it's still not enough and the built schema of netconf device after connection to controller is established (status connected) doesn't contain the "urn:ietf:params:xml:ns:netconf:notification:1.0?revision=2008-07-14)create-subscription" rpc.

We tried to debug the whole process of building schema of connected netconf device and we found out that maybe the problem lies in getDeviceSpecificRpc where the handleSalInitializationSuccess is called with DOMRpcService with NetconfMessageTransformer built in getDeviceSpecificRpc-NetconfMessageTransformer which doesn't check if the device isNotificationSupported() and just calls the baseSchemas.getBaseSchema() which doesn't contain notification support.

So the solution may be simple: change baseSchemas.getBaseSchema() to this.resolveBaseSchema() (which checks if the device should support notifications i.e it advertised the capability) in getDeviceSpecificRpc-NetconfMessageTransformer.
Is this something intentional and the simulated device should still provide the model as well?