Most daemons have the feature where they will re-read their configuration files and reinitialise when sent a hangup signal (SIGHUP). Udevd doesn't seem to respond in this way, which makes interactively configuring udev.rules difficult. Some users have reported having to reboot completely, while my own personal experience includes killing udevd and restarting it manually.
Um, you're kidding, right? udevd has _no_ configuration files. udevd reads _no_ configuration files. So there is no reason for udevd to handle SIGHUP as it would mean nothing to it. udevd spawns a new udev program every time it needs to (when it gets a hotplug event from udevsend). When that udev program starts up, it reads the udev.rules file from disk. So you can edit that file all you want, and the next time udevd spawns a udev instance, it will use the new values you have created. If anyone has any problems with editing rules, and thinks they need to reboot, please point them to the linux-hotplug-devel mailing list where they can get lots of help about udev.
Is there a way to make it spawn/respawn alsa devices? After emerging udev-023 nvidia and alsa devices weren't created upon next reboot (well, one alsa device was created:/dev/snd/controlc0). So remerged the previous udev to get them working again. The previous one worked fine and created those devices, but could not seem to get it to spawn alsa or nvidia devices after remerging the previous udev until rebooted. I can see where devices like a camera or scanner can be unplugged and replugged back in and a new device node created, but what about devices that can't be. I must be missing something here and/or something else like hotplug is causing it.
run udevstart to get everything regenerated. If you still have problems, create a new bug with the info.
