The libuuid library generates and parses 128-bit Universally Unique IDs (UUIDs). A UUID is an identifier that is unique within the space of all such identifiers across both space and time. It can be used for multiple purposes, from tagging objects with an extremely short lifetime to reliably identifying very persistent objects across a network.

See RFC 4122 for more information.

This package contains the uuidgen program and the uuidd daemon.

The uuidd daemon is used to generate UUIDs, especially time-based UUIDs, in a secure and guaranteed-unique fashion, even in the face of large numbers of threads trying to grab UUIDs running on different CPUs. It is used by libuuid as well as the uuidgen program.