The uevent helper program is forked by the kernel for
every uevent.
Before the switch to the netlink-based uevent source, this was
used to hook hotplug scripts into kernel device events. It
usually pointed to a shell script at /sbin/hotplug.
This should not be used today, because usual systems create
many events at bootup or device discovery in a very short time
frame. One forked process per event can create so many processes
that it creates a high system load, or on smaller systems
it is known to create out-of-memory situations during bootup.