Udev

udev is introduced by the sparse website at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev.html. It extended, superseded and utterly replaced devfs, a turn-of-the-century abortion birthed by Richard Gooch (for details on this gory struggle (long since settled in udev's favor), see Greg Kroah-Hartman's whitepaper, 'udev and devfs - the final word'. It implements device naming for Linux systems -- that is, maps kernel hardware entities to userspace keys. Furthermore, it emits low-level DBus messages; clients such as HAL can listen to these events and perform arbitrarily complex actions. udev is made up of both a kernel component (included in 2.6 Linux kernels; 2.6.19 is the minimum recommended version as of this writing (see the kernel documentation)) and a userspace daemon (udevd) plus its configuration.