1udev - userspace device management
2
3For more information see the files in the docs/ directory.
4
5Important Note:
6  Integrating udev in the system is a whole lot of work, has complex dependencies
7  and differs a lot from distro to distro. All major distros depend on udev these
8  days and the system may not work without a proper installed version. The upstream
9  udev project does not support or recommend to replace a distro's udev installation
10  with the upstream version. The installation of a unmodified upstream version may
11  render your system unusable. Until now, there is no "default" setup or a set of
12  "default" rules provided by the upstream udev version.
13
14Requirements:
15  - Version 2.6.15 of the Linux kernel for reliable operation of this release of
16    udev. The kernel may have a requirement on udev too, see Documentation/Changes
17    in the kernel source tree for the actual dependency.
18
19  - The kernel must have sysfs, unix domain sockets and networking enabled.
20    (unix domain sockets (CONFIG_UNIX) as a loadable kernel module may work,
21    but it is completely silly - don't complain if anything goes wrong.)
22
23  - The proc filesystem must be mounted on /proc, the sysfs filesystem must
24    be mounted at /sys. No other location will be supported by udev.
25
26
27Operation:
28  Udev creates and removes device nodes in /dev, based on events the kernel
29  sends out on device discovery or removal.
30
31  - Very early in the boot process, the /dev directory should get a 'tmpfs'
32    filesystem mounted, which is populated from scratch by udev. Created nodes
33    or changed permissions will not survive a reboot, which is intentional.
34
35  - The content of /lib/udev/devices directory which contains the nodes,
36    symlinks and directories, which are always expected to be in /dev, should
37    be copied over to the tmpfs mounted /dev, to provide the required nodes
38    to initialize udev and continue booting.
39
40  - The old hotplug helper /sbin/hotplug should be disabled on bootup, before
41    actions like loading kernel modules are taken, which may cause a lot of
42    events.
43
44  - The udevd daemon must be started on bootup to receive netlink uevents
45    from the kernel driver core.
46
47  - All kernel events are matched against a set of specified rules in
48    /etc/udev/rules.d/ which make it possible to hook into the event
49    processing to load required kernel modules and setup devices. For all
50    devices the kernel exports a major/minor number, udev will create a
51    device node with the default kernel name or the one specified by a
52    matching udev rule.
53
54
55Compile Options:
56  DESTDIR
57  	Prefix of install target, used for package building.
58  USE_LOG
59  	If set to 'true', udev is able to pass errors or debug information
60  	to syslog. This is very useful to see what udev is doing or not doing.
61  	It is enabled by default, don't expect any useful answer, if you
62  	need to hunt a bug, but you can't enable syslog.
63  DEBUG
64  	If set to 'true', very verbose debugging messages will be compiled
65  	into the udev binaries. The actual level of debugging is specified
66  	in the udev config file.
67  USE_SELINUX
68  	If set to 'true', udev will be built with SELinux support
69  	enabled.  This is disabled by default.
70  EXTRAS
71  	list of helper programs in extras/ to build.
72        make EXTRAS="extras/cdrom_id extras/scsi_id extras/volume_id"
73
74
75Installation:
76  - The install target intalls the udev binaries in the default locations,
77    All at boot time reqired binaries will be installed in /lib/udev or /sbin.
78
79  - The default location for scripts and binaries that are called from
80    rules is /lib/udev. Other packages who install udev rules, should use
81    that directory too.
82
83  - It is recommended to use the /lib/udev/devices directory to place
84    device nodes and symlinks in, which are copied to /dev at every boot.
85    That way, nodes for broken subsystems or devices which can't be
86    detected automatically by the kernel, will always be available.
87
88  - Copies of the rules files for the major distros are provided as examples
89    in the etc/udev directory.
90
91  - The persistent device naming links in /dev/disk/ are required by other
92    software that depends on the data udev has collected from the devices
93    and should be installed by default with every udev installation.
94
95Please direct any comment/question/concern to the linux-hotplug-devel mailing list at:
96  linux-hotplug-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
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98