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What is udev in Linux?

Updated: 11/9/2022
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11y ago

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Udev is an important device management system primarily used by the kernel and the userspace to more readily detect, manage, and populate your hardware to the system.

When you first boot a Linux system, the bootscripts found in the initramfs will use udev to dynamically detect and load drivers for all your hardware and populate /dev with virtual device files.

While it is possible to run a Linux system without udev, it is not recommended and is usually only done in mobile or embedded Linux implementations to speed up booting and go easy on memory. Usually they take care to have all drivers compiled into the kernel and make sure all the correct configuration is set in early userspace. Running without udev is not very forgiving.

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