Slackware Linux is moving to eudev

Some big news was revealed through the Slackware Current (pre-release) changelog today as the switch from udev to eudev was finally announced.

And this is a big deal because?

udev, which is a device manager for the Linux kernel was absorbed into systemd back in 2012 with a notion of fully supporting systems not running systemd.

As a response to the merging of udev into systemd, the Gentoo eudev project (an udev fork) officially launched a few months later. Their goal was to provide better compatibility with existing software, older kernels, various toolchains and anything else required by users.

By switching to eudev Slackware seem to have landed firmly on the “right” side of the systemd fence. For the time being at least, the old proven Unix philosophy still lives strong in Slackware land.

As for the actual move to eudev, everything went without a hitch on my system and I’ve had zero issues after the upgrade. All in all, pretty smooth sailing in my opinion.

Anyhow, it’s advisable to pay close attention to the changelog as you need to install the new packages before upgrading.
I used the sequence below to perform the upgrade (you can skip step 2 and 4).

slackpkg update
slackpkg remove udev
slackpkg install-new
slackpkg upgrade aaa_elflibs
slackpkg upgrade-all
slackpkg clean-system