NetLink DEVice manager

Installation

# edit config.mk according to your needs
% make
% make PREFIX=/ MANPREFIX=/usr/share/man install

nldev + mdev

For getting nldev and mdev to work use the following instructions.

% cd /tmp
% git clone git://busybox.net/busybox.git
% cd busybox
% make
% cp busybox /bin
% cd /bin
% ln -s busybox mdev

Now copy over all the required files.

% cd $nldevdir
% mkdir -p /lib/mdev
% mkdir -p /etc
% cp mdev/etc/mdev.conf /etc
% cp mdev/lib/* /lib/mdev 

In you init scripts you will need to trigger:

% run_nldev &
% nltrigger all

By default run_nldev will log to the daemon facility and the notice level. This can be adjusted by editing run_nldev direct- ly.

CAUTION

Because of the asynchronous initialisation of every device that needs some firmware or some that just take some time to appear in the kernel, don’t assume interfaces to be there after startup. Always add some step to check for the devices to be there or do them per service.

udev replacement

Many application directly depend on libudev and so need the overengineered backends of udev to work. Most of this (like X11) can be avoided by having symlinks to static devices and leaving all the automatism in one place instead of many.

Scripts that call the udev tools directly will need to be patched, like laptop-mode-utils.

advanced nldev

As shown in the manpages does nldev allow some more flexibility, but was mainly written to be a missing piece in replacing udevd.

For example many instances of nldev could be run, call scripts with simpler logic than mdev and doing less.

nlmon

On http://git.r-36.net/nlmon/ you will find the little brother of nldev, which can be run without root rights as user and used to run scripts on certain events.

Have fun!