Title: eudev retirement on 2022-01-01
Author: Anthony G. Basile <blueness@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2021-08-24
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: sys-fs/eudev
UPDATE (2022-01-14): sys-fs/eudev is now maintained by a new collection
of cross-distribution contributors. It will therefore remain in the
Gentoo repository.
Help is still welcome with maintaining it within Gentoo if users
are interested.
The default for new installs will remain sys-fs/udev and the
rest of this news item still applies.
---
sys-fs/udev is becoming the standard provider of udev on non-systemd (e.g.
OpenRC) systems. Users of systemd will continue to use the udev services
provided by the sys-apps/systemd package itself.
The transition should be uneventful in most cases, but please
read this item in full to understand some possible corner cases.
eudev will be retired and removed from Gentoo on 2022-01-01. We will
start masking eudev on 2021-10-01 and give people 3 months to prepare
their transition. You should ensure that sys-fs/eudev is not in your
world file by running
emerge --deselect sys-fs/eudev
in order for Portage to replace eudev with sys-fs/udev once the
package.mask is in place. We fully support udev on musl, whereas uclibc
will still have to rely on eudev before also being removed on 2022-01-01.
**WARNING 1**
If you happen to have an INSTALL_MASK including "systemd", e.g. a
blanket "*systemd*" glob, you will inevitably break your system. sys-fs/udev
contains "systemd" in some of its directories and filenames, hence a blanket
filter rule will likely lead to a non-functional udev installation.
Please also verify you do not have "sys-fs/udev" in package.mask.
**WARNING 2**
If you DO NOT want the "predictable interface naming" of newer versions
of udev and instead prefer the old style (e.g. "eth0"), there are several
options available.
The simplest is to pass 'net.ifnames=0' on the kernel command line.
See the wiki for more information:
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Udev#Optional:_Disable_or_override_predictable_network_interface_naming.
Rationale
The integration of udev into the systemd git repo introduced numerous
problems for non-glibc systems, such as musl and uclibc. Several
options were considered, and the one chosen was to fork and maintain udev
independent of the rest of systemd. This was meant as a stop-gap solution
until such time as the problems with systemd on musl had been resolved.
This is now the case with patches provided by openembedded, and my original
reason for maintaining eudev is no longer relevant.
I am willing to transfer eudev to another umbrella organization or Linux
distribution that is willing to continue its maintenance, but maintaining
eudev cannot be done purely through proxy-maintaining and requires an
understanding of its internals. This is a steep learning curve and must
be an earnest effort. For this reason, the Base System project has decided
not to support eudev as an option going forward.
