Kay Sievers is a computer programmer, best known for developing the udev device manager of Linux,[1] the systemd replacement for the System V init daemon[2] and the Gummiboot EFI boot loader.[3] Kay Sievers made major contributions to the hardware hotplug and device management subsystems of the Linux Kernel.[4] In 2012, together with Harald Hoyer, Sievers was the main driving force behind Fedora's merging of the /lib, /bin and /sbin file system trees into /usr, a simplification which has since been adopted by other distributions such as Arch Linux. This is the first major update to the Linux file system layout since the File System Hierarchy was defined 18 years earlier.[5]
He is employed by Red Hat, Inc.[6] and previously has worked for Novell.[7]
Kay Sievers grew up in Eastern Germany under the communist regime[8] and nowadays resides in Hamburg, Germany.[9]