This document references udevstart which is deprecated in this line (below Code Section 3.6) : Important: If you have issues starting up alsamixer and get errors such as alsamixer: function snd_ctl_open failed for default: No such file or directory, this is usually an issue with udev setting up the devices. Run killall udevd; _udevstart_ to reload /dev entries and fire up alsamixer. It should solve the issue. udevstart does not exist on current systems, and I believe that it has been replaced with the functionality of udevd --daemon && udevadm trigger what the little knowledge I have gathered here. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Is documentation typographical error, consistent as the page is static. 2. 3. Actual Results: # udev [tab] [tab] udevadm udevd udevinfo udevsettle Expected Results: # udev udevadm udevd udevinfo udevsettle udevstart I fumbled a lot around on web search engines trying to find if udevstart was truly deprecated for gentoo, and eventually only truly found a workaround (since using both udevd and udevadm to replace one command seemed somewhat elusive to me). I did find many other instances of other users encountering the same troubles and referencing this same line in the documentation.
CCing the folks who know how udev works for comment. Guys, what's the replacement for "killall udevd; udevstart" these days?
udevstart was a very old way to run udevd and trigger all events another time. udev is now startup by just running udevd and the doing udevadm trigger. In case coldplugging is disabled udevadm trigger is called with restricting arguments. So I don't know why you need to restart udev, but if it was only to reload the rules it is not necessary, as udevd does watch its rule directories via inotify (See Bug #255613 for Documenting this). If it was to retrigger the events it is enough to run "udevadm trigger".
Went ahead and removed the entire deprecated paragraph, since the new udev handles stuff a lot smarter than the old versions that included udevstart.
