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- udev - userspace device management
-
- Integrating udev in the system has complex dependencies and differs from distro
- to distro. All major distros depend on udev these days and the system may not
- work without a properly installed version. The upstream udev project does not
- recommend to replace a distro's udev installation with the upstream version.
-
- Tools and rules shipped by udev are not public API and may change at any time.
- Never call any private tool in /lib/udev from any external application, it might
- just go away in the next release. Access to udev information is only offered
- by udevadm and libudev. Tools and rules in /lib/udev, and the entire content of
- the /dev/.udev directory is private to udev and does change whenever needed.
-
- Requirements:
- - Version 2.6.27 of the Linux kernel with sysfs, procfs, signalfd, inotify,
- unix domain sockets, networking and hotplug enabled:
- CONFIG_HOTPLUG=y
- CONFIG_UEVENT_HELPER_PATH=""
- CONFIG_NET=y
- CONFIG_UNIX=y
- CONFIG_SYSFS=y
- CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED*=n
- CONFIG_PROC_FS=y
- CONFIG_TMPFS=y
- CONFIG_INOTIFY_USER=y
- CONFIG_SIGNALFD=y
- CONFIG_TMPFS_POSIX_ACL=y (user ACLs for device nodes)
- CONFIG_BLK_DEV_BSG=y (SCSI devices)
-
- - For reliable operations, the kernel must not use the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED*
- option.
-
- - Unix domain sockets (CONFIG_UNIX) as a loadable kernel module may work,
- but it is not supported.
-
- - The proc filesystem must be mounted on /proc, the sysfs filesystem must
- be mounted at /sys. No other locations are supported by udev.
-
- - The system must have the following group names resolvable at udev startup:
- disk, cdrom, floppy, tape, audio, video, lp, tty, dialout, kmem.
- Especially in LDAP setups, it is required, that getgrnam() is able to resolve
- these group names with only the rootfs mounted, and while no network is
- available.
-
- - To build all udev extras, libacl, libglib2, libusb, usbutils, pciutils,
- gperf are needed. These dependencies can be disabled with the
- --disable-extras option.
-
- Operation:
- Udev creates and removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel
- sends out on device discovery or removal.
-
- - Early in the boot process, the /dev directory should get a 'tmpfs'
- filesystem mounted, which is maintained by udev. Created nodes or changed
- permissions will not survive a reboot, which is intentional.
-
- - The content of /lib/udev/devices directory which contains the nodes,
- symlinks and directories, which are always expected to be in /dev, should
- be copied over to the tmpfs mounted /dev, to provide the required nodes
- to initialize udev and continue booting.
-
- - The deprecated hotplug helper /sbin/hotplug should be disabled in the
- kernel configuration, it is not needed today, and may render the system
- unusable because the kernel may create too many processes in parallel
- so that the system runs out-of-memory.
-
- - All kernel events are matched against a set of specified rules in
- /lib/udev/rules.d which make it possible to hook into the event
- processing to load required kernel modules and setup devices. For all
- devices the kernel exports a major/minor number, udev will create a
- device node with the default kernel name, or the one specified by a
- matching udev rule.
-
- Please direct any comment/question to the linux-hotplug mailing list at:
- linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org
-
-