-udev - userspace device management
+udev - Linux userspace device management
-For more information see the files in the docs/ directory.
+Integrating udev in the system has complex dependencies and may differ from
+distribution to distribution. A system may not be able to boot up or work
+reliably without a properly installed udev version. The upstream udev project
+does not recommend to replace a distro's udev installation with the upstream
+version.
-Important Note:
- Integrating udev in the system is a whole lot of work, has complex dependencies
- and differs a lot from distro to distro. All reasonable distros depend on udev
- these days and the system will not work without it.
+The upstream udev project's set of default rules may require a most recent
+kernel release to work properly. This is currently version 2.6.31.
- The upstream udev project does not support or recomend to replace a distro's udev
- installation with the upstream version. The installation of a unmodified upstream
- version may render your system unusable! There is no "default" setup or a set
- of "default" rules provided by the upstream udev 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:
- - 2.6.x version of the Linux kernel. See the RELEASE-NOTES file in the
- udev tree and the Documentation/Changes in the kernel source tree for
- the actual dependency.
-
- - The kernel must have sysfs and unix domain socket enabled.
- (unix domain sockets (CONFIG_UNIX) as a loadable kernel module may work,
- but it is completely silly, don't complain if anything goes wrong.)
-
- - The proc filesystem must be mounted on /proc.
-
- - The sysfs filesystem must be mounted at /sys. No other location
- will be supported by udev.
-
+ - 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)
+
+ - Udev will not work with the CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED* option.
+
+ - Unix domain sockets (CONFIG_UNIX) as a loadable kernel module may work,
+ but it is not supported.
+
+ - 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.
+
+ - The proc filesystem must be mounted on /proc, the sysfs filesystem must
+ be mounted at /sys. No other locations are supported by a standard
+ udev installation.
+
+ - 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 configure option.
+
+Setup:
+ - At bootup, the /dev directory should get the 'devtmpfs' filesystem
+ mounted. Udev will manage permissions and ownership of the kernel-created
+ device nodes, and possibly create additional symlinks. If needed, udev also
+ works on an empty 'tmpfs' filesystem, but some static device nodes like
+ /dev/null, /dev/console, /dev/kmsg are needed to be able to start udev itself.
+
+ - The udev daemon should be started to handle device events sent by the kernel.
+ During bootup, the kernel can be asked to send events for all already existing
+ devices, to apply the configuration to these devices. This is usually done by:
+ /sbin/udevadm trigger --type=subsystems
+ /sbin/udevadm trigger --type=devices
+
+ - Restarting the daemon does never apply any rules to existing devices.
+
+ - New/changed rule files are picked up automatically, there is no daemon
+ restart or signal needed.
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, /dev should get a tmpfs filesystem
- mounted, which is populated from scratch 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 udevd daemon must be started by an init script to receive netlink
- uevents from the kernel driver core.
-
- - From kernel version 2.6.15 on, the hotplug helper /sbin/hotplug should
- be disabled with an init script before actions like loading kernel
- modules are taken, which may cause a lot of events.
-
- - All kernel events are matched against a set of specified rules in
- /etc/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 requests a device node, udev will create one with
- the default name or the one specified by a matching udev rules.
-
-
-Compile Options:
- DESTDIR
- Prefix of install target, used for package building.
- USE_LOG
- If set to 'true', udev is able to pass errors or debug information
- to syslog. This is very useful to see what udev is doing or not doing.
- It is enabled by default, don't expect any useful answer, if you
- need to hunt a bug, but you can't enable syslog.
- DEBUG
- If set to 'true', very verbose debugging messages will be compiled
- into the udev binaries. The actual level of debugging is specified
- in the udev config file.
- STRIPCMD
- If udev is compiled for packaging an empty string can be passed
- to disable the stripping of the binaries.
- USE_SELINUX
- If set to 'true', udev will be built with SELinux support
- enabled. This is disabled by default.
- USE_KLIBC
- If set to 'true', udev is built and linked against klibc.
- Default value is 'false'. KLCC specifies the klibc compiler
- wrapper, usually located at /usr/bin/klcc.
- EXTRAS
- If set, will build the "extra" helper programs as specified
- as listed (see below for an example).
-
-If you want to build the udev helper programs:
- make EXTRAS="extras/cdrom_id extras/scsi_id extras/volume_id"
-
-
-Installation:
- - The install target intalls the udev binaries in the default locations,
- All at boot time reqired binaries will be installed in /sbin.
-
- - The default location for scripts and binaries that are called from
- rules is /lib/udev. Other packages who install udev rules, should use
- that directory too.
-
- - It is recommended to use the /lib/udev/devices directory to place
- device nodes and symlinks in, which are copied to /dev at every boot.
- That way, nodes for broken subsystems or devices which can't be
- detected automatically by the kernel, will always be available.
-
- - Copies of the rules files for all major distros are in the etc/udev
- directory (you may look there how others distros are doing it).
-
- - The persistent disk links in /dev/disk are the de facto standard
- on Linux and should be installed with every default udev installation.
- The devfs naming scheme rules are not recommended and not supported.
-
-Please direct any comment/question/concern to the linux-hotplug-devel mailing list at:
- linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
-
+ - Udev creates/removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel
+ sends out on device creation/removal.
+
+ - All kernel events are matched against a set of specified rules, which
+ possibly hook into the event processing and load required kernel
+ modules to setup devices. For all devices the kernel exports a major/minor
+ number, if needed, udev will create a device node with the default kernel
+ name. If specified, udev applies permissions/ownership to the device
+ node, creates additional symlinks pointing to the node, and executes
+ programs to handle the device.
+
+ - The events udev handles, and the information udev merges into its device
+ database, can be accessed with libudev:
+ http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/libudev/
+ http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/gudev/
+
+For more details about udev and udev rules see the udev(7) man page.
+
+Please direct any comment/question to the linux-hotplug mailing list at:
+ linux-hotplug@vger.kernel.org
~ianmdlvl / elogind.git / blobdiff