Looking forward to 2.6.16 [LWN.net]

Looking forward to 2.6.16

Posted Jan 10, 2006 23:54 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
Parent article: Looking forward to 2.6.16

One thing I've been wondering for a while: what does `uevent' actually stand for, and why is it considered more euphonious than `hotplug'?

(I hope it's not `user event'; that'd be a rather bad choice of name. Typing on the keyboard is a user event. Coldplugging hda is unlikely to be.)

(Oh, and Greg, Kay, if you're reading this, thanks again for udev; I don't hotplug much, but I use udev regardless, as for sheer elegance udev, especially the new udevsynthesize/shell script/uevent/udevd scheme, is one of the nicest designs I've seen in a long time.)

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Looking forward to 2.6.16

Posted Jan 11, 2006 0:32 UTC (Wed) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]

Yeah, it means "userspace event", sorry we could not not come up with a better name.

But it does describe what is happening, userspace is being notified that
something happened in the kernel.

And it's better than "hotplug" which is overloaded way too much these
days (hotplug memory, hotplug cpu, hotplug usb devices, etc.) and we export
more information through the uevent interface than just "hotplug" add
and remove events these days.

Looking forward to 2.6.16

Posted Jan 11, 2006 4:29 UTC (Wed) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

So you deny that it's part of a plot to turn Linux into a ukernel? :)

Looking forward to 2.6.16

Posted Jan 11, 2006 4:42 UTC (Wed) by gregkh (subscriber, #8) [Link]

I completly deny that plot. If you look at the mess that is the driver core that I helped create, you would know that I'm all about the big, monolithic kernel model :)